Her Naked Skin

Her Naked Skin follows the progress of Lesley Manville’s sprightly suffragette Lady Celia Cain, who tackles a perfunctory prison spell like a bracing adventure holiday, before launching herself purposefully at a scandalous career of sexual inversion. She and Jemima Rooper drink beer, smoke, swear, undertake a lot of athletic kissing and look rather fetching in matching dressing gowns. Rob Howell’s massive prison set looms over it all, but somehow sexual liberation outside its high walls takes dramatic precedence over the wilful, principled martyrdoms of the women incarcerated within.

The Holloway end of the story is left to be upheld by in suitably indomitable fashion by Susan Engel as professional suffragist Florence Boorman, braving the hunger-strike with steely conviction and flashes of wise, waspish humour. And as the show progresses, subdued rituals of sympathetic solidarity develop between vast-bosomed, monosyllabic wardresses, frigidly compliant nurses and frightened, stubborn, suffering prisoners.

There was a discernible split in the audience, between those who knew exactly what was coming when a doctor enters holding a rubber tube, and those who didn’t. Several of the latter responded to the ensuing scene of force-feeding by fainting theatrically all over the auditorium. This bout of audience histrionics did nothing to clarify the play’s denouement, but it did suggest that the National is quite right to be putting on a play that revisits this inglorious chapter of British political history.

The play is impressively even-handed with its historical materials, reminding us that men as well as women were still agitating for enfranchisement at the beginning of the twentieth century. And Adrian Rawlins gives a compelling portrait of disintegrating tolerance as Celia’s frustrated, hard-drinking, emotionally isolated husband. But as Her Naked Skin increasingly focuses on the pleasures and price of sexual rather than political liberation, the show’s suffragette narrative often feels like a dutiful appendix to a more seductive central story.

The show’s split-focus also leads to rather wearisome dramatic sprawl, and after a couple of hours some of the audience around me were starting to manifest the despairing camaraderie of prisoners a long way from their release date. In the end, Her Naked Skin is a bit like its heroine: courageous, demanding, articulate, divided, unpredictable and – despite good intentions – ultimately alienating.