Lex Kosanke Archives - thespyinthestalls.com

★★★★

“a highly watchable cast, delivering line after line of snappy dialogue”

Katherine Moar’s “Ragdoll” is inspired by the trial of Patty Hearst – the heiress turned actress, kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army in the 1970s who was later convicted of working with them and being charged for armed robbery. Her defence lawyer, Francis Lee Bailey, lost the case despite putting forward the fact that she was coerced into it by her captors. Although the names have been changed, there is little to separate the fictional characters from the real-life ones (even the SLA is namedropped). So ‘inspired by’ is probably an understatement. The disguise is a very thin veil. There is no disguising at all, however, the sharpness of Moar’s writing in her thoughtful, thought-provoking, ingeniously structured and punchy new play.

The narrative is split between two pivotal points in the lives of our protagonists. In the late seventies, Holly (Katie Matsell) is awaiting trial for her role in the armed robberies. Her hotshot lawyer, Robert (Ben Lamb) sees it as a case to project his career into the major league. There is a lot of media attention, some of it unwanted and unwarranted. Robert has his own distractions, too, mainly in the shape of a hack journalist out to smear his name. We first meet the couple in the present day. They are estranged by now, but Robert (Nathaniel Parker) is calling in a favour from Holly (Abigail Cruttenden), hoping she can bear witness to his character and help clear him of allegations of an ‘inappropriate nature’. Holly is naturally resentful – having been ghosted and abandoned by Robert decades earlier. We are aghast at Robert’s confidence that borders on arrogance. Tensions and stakes are high, and emotions rise even higher, tempered by moments during which Moar leads us gently into ‘odd-couple’ comedy territory.

We never drift into familiar territory, however. Even if sometimes we think we might be heading that way. Whenever that happens, Moar repeatedly sticks the knife in with a twist, forcing us to look at things in a different way. The two time periods are separated, until further twists reveal how great and significant the overlap is between past and present. A fascinating dramatic device is at play here, which the cast pull off masterfully.

The characters are undoubtedly privileged but are played with a compassion that arouses our sympathy. Matsell’s nervous idealism as the younger Holly turns into the fury and resignation that Cruttenden portrays with a bubbling, volcanic strength. Lamb, as the rising star of the courtroom, hasn’t yet had his smooth confidence worn away by the knocks to his career, while Parker’s present-day Robert, however, clings onto this self-conviction by a thread. They are both victims in a way. Victims of changing times and attitudes as much as circumstance. “If I had died, people would like me more” quips Holly in retrospect, thankfully without sentimentality. Josh Seymour directs with a tight hand on the oscillating structure: the actors watching their other selves, engaging and reacting. Ceci Calf’s simple set, strewn with packing cases, is dominated by an expensive, cream leather sofa, rich in symbolism.

This is only Moar’s second play, but the dialogue has a veteran’s finely-honed shrewdness and insight, offering peep holes into social history as well as the human condition. Its context is specific, but the questions raised are far reaching. With a highly watchable cast, delivering line after line of snappy dialogue, “Ragdoll” is an absolute joy to watch. We barely have time to think about what we are supposed to be thinking about – there’s time to do that on the tube journey home. We know, though, that we have been in the presence of a writing talent to keep an eye out for.

Rice

Orange Tree Theatre

Reviewed – 13th October 2021

★★★★

“Michele Lee has created great characters and a compelling story”

Rice is Michele Lee’s enterprising two hander about women of colour trapped in the heirarchical (and blinkered) world of male dominated business in Australia. It has just opened at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond. It’s a co-production between the Orange Tree and the Actors Touring Company, directed by Matthew Xia. Despite the best efforts of all concerned, Rice is a play with a brilliant premise that doesn’t quite meet its promise.

Lee, who is Hmong-Australian, wanted to create a play that gave two actresses of colour a chance to play multiple roles—roles of “versatility and virtuosity and range.” In creating Nisha, (played by Zainab Hasan) an ambitious young executive hoping to rise in the Golden Fields rice company of Melbourne, and pitting her against the older Yvette (Sarah Lam), a cleaner of Chinese ancestry at the same company, Lee creates a situation fraught with cross cultural tensions both within and without these women’s lives. Hasan does not only play Nisha, an Australian of West Bengali ancestry, but shifts into a variety of roles, including Sheree, Yvette’s troubled daughter, and the white (and very privileged) son of David Egan—a man who is threatening her daughter with a prison sentence. Lam takes on an equally dazzling range of roles, including Tom Budd, an executive at Nisha’s company with whom Nisha has a brief and ill-judged affair; Graeme Hartley, a management “guru”, and Gretel Patel—who brings Nisha’s dreams of advancement to a crashing fall during a disastrous business trip to India.

The story of Rice is quite simple: Nisha and Yvette meet in Nisha’s office where she has been working long hours. Nisha is unhappy with Yvette’s refusal to clean her workspace to her liking. Yvette has very definite ideas about what she should be cleaning. But this clash between powerful personalities is about to become irrelevant in company politics—the Golden Fields company has just hired a management “guru” who is slashing and burning every budget he can find. Thrown together in mutual misery in a series of after business hours encounters, the women become friends. They bond over food, naturally—both Yvette’s home cooked Chinese dishes, and Nisha’s concern over her happy go lucky boyfriend’s food truck and his “khaki rolls.”

Two actresses, no matter how experienced or talented—as Lam and Hasan are—cannot quite pull off the range of roles in Rice, although dialect coach Catherine Weate has done sterling work with all the accents. It’s hard for the audience to keep track of all the characters that cross this bright, white stage in ninety five minutes of playing time. It’s to Lee’s credit that she has created such interesting and varied roles—it would be great to see a cast playing each role with a single actor. Similarly, the change of scenes in Rice would benefit from changes of scenery. Changing the lighting (again, even in the talented hands of Bethany Gupwell, the lighting designer) doesn’t quite do it.

A play with such a varied cast and complex settings (the scenes shift from Melbourne, Australia to Delhi, India) is a lot to pull off successfully in a small theatre in the round. The intimacy of the Orange Tree stage should work well in a two hander, but in this case, the set design is unnecessarily cluttered with a desk. This makes playing in the round quite tricky—every time someone sits down at that desk, the space is transformed from four into three sides, and the audience seated on the fourth side behind the desk have to grapple with the backs (or, at best, the profiles) of the performers. This happens too often not to be an unwelcome distraction. But the overwhelming feeling that remains after the conclusion of this production of Rice—is that this might not be a piece for the theatre. Perhaps the story would show to best advantage as an Australian indie film—the kind that has made Australian film making famous.

In Rice, Michele Lee has created great characters and a compelling story. But it needs the right environment to show to best advantage. Put together a bigger cast in the right medium—and this could be a classic.

RAGDOLL

Jermyn Street Theatre

★★★★

“a highly watchable cast, delivering line after line of snappy dialogue”

RAGDOLL

Jermyn Street Theatre

Reviewed on 14th October 2025

by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Alex Brenner

Previously reviewed at this venue:

RAGDOLL

RAGDOLL

RAGDOLL

Orange Tree Theatre

Reviewed – 13th October 2021

★★★★

“Michele Lee has created great characters and a compelling story”

In Rice, Michele Lee has created great characters and a compelling story. But it needs the right environment to show to best advantage. Put together a bigger cast in the right medium—and this could be a classic.

Reviewed by Dominica Plummer

Photography by Helen Murray

Rice

Orange Tree Theatre until 13th November

Five star reviews this year:

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