Ragdoll Review – Patty Hearst inspires a bold novel about power and privilege | stage

yourAtherine Moar’s gripping drama is inspired by American heiress Patty Hearst who served a prison sentence for a bank robbery organized by the far-left guerrilla group, the Symbionese Liberation Army. The group had kidnapped her months earlier and in court testimony she told how she was locked in a closet and raped during captivity.

This memory play traces the aftermath of such a case through a fictional encounter between heiress Holly (Abigail Cruttenden) and the lawyer Robert (Nathaniel Parker) who lost her case.

They meet many decades after the event. Robert became a famous California attorney, whose life was turned upside down by allegations of sexual misconduct. He invites Holly, now fully rehabilitated into high society, to his apartment in hopes that she will speak up on his behalf. The irony could not be greater, given the doubts he raised in 1978 about her account of rape. “How things change,” Holly says. “Forty years ago, it was sex. Now it’s rape.”

It begins in 2017, a few months before the sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein, although this is not made clear. The toxic legacy of the 1970s is reconsidered from a post-#MeToo perspective. The subject is explored with great tension, although some of the complexities of the Hearst case are ironed out; There is no discussion of coercion or brainwashing, as occurred during her trial. But all the issues are there, and the drama is also present in abundance.

In essence, the two-handed game is played as a four-armed game, with younger versions of both characters (Katie Matsell as the heiress and Ben Lamb as the lawyer) activating flashbacks. Under Josh Seymour’s deft direction, the older characters transform into their younger selves and begin to interact with them, as if the past has been transformed into flesh and blood. It gives the play a bold theatricality that works with surprising precision.

Neither Holly nor Robert are particularly likable: he is simply obnoxious, and she is self-respecting and entitled. But her privilege is part of the genius of this play: it still makes her powerless, despite her powerful family.

The play is best in combat mode and you don’t quite know how to end but that doesn’t matter. Moar’s dialogue is so clever and brilliant, you can listen to it over and over again. Her first play, Farm Hall, about the German nuclear program in 1945, premiered at this theater and found greater life in a West End transfer. This is worth doing the same.