THE LUMINOUS at Greenwich Theatre
★★★
“the actors play determined everywomen with plenty of brio, empathy and skill.”
What do all these have in common? The matchgirls’ strike of 1888, modern hospital regeneration, the Greenham Common peace camps of the 1980s, a sleepless half-twin, and a lady in a brown bonnet who is likely a ghost.
Although the solution is never properly clear, three women – Mighty, Mags and Alice – spend 90 minutes wrestling with the pieces in an attempt to create a cohesive picture.
A couple of bottles of red help.
This is a book club, comprising NHS workers kicking back. They’re studying The Luminous. Depending on your point of view, it’s either a lurid potboiler or a brutal examination of oppression in the 1880s. The title springs from the glowing bones of match workers who are slowly poisoned by deadly phosphorus.
Over the course of an evening, the increasingly drunken trio tackle – well, let’s hand over to the trigger warning on the publicity for a rundown: “Sensitive themes of violence against women (physical and sexual), abortion, illness and grief. It contains references to childbirth, self-immolation and nuclear warfare. It also contains strong language, ableist and misogynistic language and an abstract depiction of an autopsy.”
Self-immolation and nuclear warfare?
That’s some night.
The stage is spare, the scene is set. Catherine Dyson, also the writer, Cassie Friend and Rebecca Loukes ably play the three women who leap from this period to that, from drunken dancing to rueful recollections of family rifts. One minute we’re in hospital scrubs, the next we’re in the downbeat drapes of Victorian East London with Jack the Ripper loitering somewhere in the fog.
It’s a lot. But a theme emerges. Everywhere we turn, the women have it rough and every man we meet is a moustache-twiddling villain bent on copping a feel and worse.
The production tries hard to make these time jumps seamless, keeping the three on stage and offering up slick costume and tonal changes. There’s song, dance, a slide show and that autopsy. Under director Sabina Netherclift’s direction the pace is necessarily steady, so we’re always with the ever-shifting action, but there are so many ideas scrabbling for attention that some get left behind, never achieving a satisfying resolution.
Of all the conjoined sketches, the production feels most comfortable in the Penny Gaff, a raucous music hall where a lascivious ringmaster sells his girls on tales of West End glory while re-enacting bloody murder tableaux.
The parade of miseries the women endure – assault, oppression, exploitation, rape, neglect, mangled abortion – are somewhat formulaic (each of the women has their own set piece trauma) but the actors play determined everywomen with plenty of brio, empathy and skill. They manage, with vino in full flow, to create a sense of community and sisterhood.
This collage has an earnest underpinning and a brisk thematic and physical momentum so by the conclusion there’s been enough goodwill accrued to provide a galvanising edge, with generations of women calling on the next to pick up the baton.
Elsewhere, the week’s most telling cultural moment was actor Saoirse Ronan informing her stunned-to-silence male couch mates on The Graham Norton Show that using a phone as a weapon is something “girls have to think about all the time”.
So, there’s sufficient truth in the drama and urgency in the message to make The Luminous an admirable and diverting polemic.
THE LUMINOUS at Greenwich Theatre
Reviewed on 1st November 2024
by Giles Broadbent
Previously reviewed at this venue:
THE RIVER | ★★★ | October 2024
VINCENT RIVER | ★★★ | June 2023
AN INTERVENTION | ★★★½ | July 2022
BAD DAYS AND ODD NIGHTS | ★★★★★ | June 2021
THE LUMINOUS
THE LUMINOUS
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