It certainly must be an exciting honour for an actress to have an esteemed playwright pen a one-woman play expressly for you. But that is exactly what happened to Nicola McAuliffe in 1981 when Arnold Wesker wrote Annie Wobbler especially for her. The play, again featuring McAuliffe, has now been updated to reflect the changes of the 45 intervening years, and Annie Wobbler (Revisited) currently is running at the Finborough Theatre in West London.
Alone on stage, McAuliffe portrays three very different women – a young college student preening herself before a date, a famous author, and finally a homeless woman and former housekeeper ranting at passers-by inside a London railway station. For each scenario she speaks to an offstage voice – the boyfriend; BBC radio interviewer James Naughtie; and the bathroom attendant informing Annie of the station’s impending closure.
Unfortunately, the play struggles to find either traction or relevance. The script feels like a collection of unrelated, desultory monologues, with little sense of arc, direction or focus. With no director credit in the programme, McAuliffe seems lost in a cascade of words and stage actions that often feel arbitrary rather than illuminating the characters or propelling the piece forward.
The set is similarly difficult to understand: a stagnant hodgepodge of wig blocks and mannequins dressed with a few gold chains, alongside books and diaries that are inconsistently handled and referred to but never seem to add much to what we are watching.
There are glimpses of the performer McAuliffe must have been when she first performed the play, the final character is the strongest, but in this revival, she often seems nervous and uncomfortable, and never quite finds her footing in the material. The updating of the play does little to add to what is already there, and the result is a production that struggles to give these three different women any real dramatic shape or purpose.
By: Arnold Wesker
Performed by: Nicola McAuliffe
To: 26 September
Running time: 75 minutes, no interval
Photo credit: Ella Carmen Dale