Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal was first produced in New York in 1928 but it did not arrive in London until 1931, delayed by difficulties of censorship. The Lord Chamberlain objected to the intimate details of a wedding night, talk of abortion and a homosexual pick-up in a speakeasy.
Sophie Treadwell (1885-1970), playwright, journalist (war correspondent in World War I), novelist, producer and sometime actor and director, was one of the newspaper reporters who attended the sensational 1922 murder trial of Ruth Snyder and Judd Grey every single day.
The trial became the inspiration for her play, a popular feminist tract on the role and place of women in a world run by men and an expressionistic comment on the dehumanising experience of modern society.
Machinal (pronounced Mak’in-al, the term is French for “mechanical” or “automatic”) describes the life of a lonely, frustrated and highly-strung young woman, who is pushed to breaking point. Her traumatic story is told in nine selected episodes, ending with execution by electric chair.
Machinal still resonates. Rosie Sheehy’s raw performance heads a fine ensemble. Richard Jones’s production gives the play the full expressionistic treatment. The actions, voices and noises are brilliantly orchestrated to reproduce, in a highly stylised and exaggerated manner, the repetitions and banalities of everyday life. The nerve-wrecking clamour of a road being drilled is particularly effective during a difficult birth in a maternity ward.
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