Lyonesse, the word conjures up myths, Arthurian legends and lost kingdoms swept away by the sea and drowned forever. Lyonesse is a Cornish Atlantis.
Penelope Skinner’s Lyonesse, however, turns out to be something less romantic and magical. It’s a feminist tract about two women’s lives being taken over by men and ruined. The cast is headed by Kristin Scott Thomas and Lily James, which is good for the box office.
Elaine is an eccentric recluse, who lives in an old messy house by the sea in Cornwall. She has a cage full of taxidermied birds and a neighbour who is a lesbian poet (Sara Powell). 30 years ago, she was forced to give up a successful film career by her abusive partner and now wants to make a comeback.
Kristin Scott Thomas enters dressed in swim suit, fur coats, gumboots and goggles, a lioness at bay, wielding an axe. She looks as if she is about to imitate Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. She loses the audience’s attention when she has to deliver an extremely long monologue, which she performs badly as a cabaret act in front of a microphone.
The caged birds also symbolize the life of Kate (Lily James), an ambitious film executive, who thinks Elaine’s story would make a good movie. Kate’s husband (James Corrigan) is a film director and he too expects her to put her career on hold and have his baby. She is not keen, having nearly died, giving birth to their daughter.
Lyonesse, directed by Ian Rickson, is overlong and heavy-going. The performance had an additional problem on the night I went. One of the actors was sick and an understudy, miscast, had to go on, unannounced, with the book. Not knowing her lines, she had to read them and she read them so softly and so poorly, two scenes were killed stone dead.
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