Exploring Her Naked Skin for performance

Her Naked Skin by Rebecca Lenkewicz is an honest and brutal play. There are no hiding places in this text. It packs punches and doesn't take a breather either. It is a constant onslaught of challenging scenes, characters, context and content. For me, it holds everything that you would want for a truly epic piece of theatre; a challenging context with a big political plot intersecting a small intimate storyline.

The playwright

Rebecca Lenkewicz's work is renowned for being dominated by the exploration of strong female characters and illuminating the lives of marginalised women. She cites her mother as an early influence. In an interview with The Guardian newspaper, she described her mother as a lioness, giving her and her four other siblings independence from an early age. This combination of challenging content and explosive characters are ideal for students. The writing, especially the characterisation, is just delicious and the tense relationships are brilliant to explore and perform.

Context

Set during the British suffragette movement before the beginning of World War One, Her Naked Skin centres on the love affair between an upper-class character, Lady Celia Cain and a working-class character Eve Douglas. These characters are real, they are messy, they make mistakes, and they love. But they do so in the most dangerous of backdrops. They first meet in March 1912, when they both take part in the window smashing campaign, organised by The Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), whose motto was ‘Deeds not words’. But it is in Holloway Prison where their hearts cross. Lady Cain, who is older, trapped by the policies of the day which is personified in her frustrating marriage, falls for the younger, fired up and angry Eve.

The context is challenging, but excitingly so. The writing speaks to us as much about our lives today as it does about the lives of those involved in the suffragette movement in 1913. From the Me Too and Time's Up campaigns, to public scandals around consent and abuse, and the rise of hate speech and violent crimes against women; this play has the capacity to cover, reference and encompass all of these, and more.

‘An epic play’

There are difficult moments in the play. Moments of huge tension that are challenging to perform and will make your audience feel uncomfortable. But these are all based on real events that took place in prisons across the country. Suffragettes were treated in a way that was beyond appalling. There is a scene of torture in the play, which you may need to remove or reimagine, but no matter how uncomfortable these moments are to watch, the discomfort comes from the truth.

So, this is an epic play. The plot takes place over a long period of time. There are thirty-one scenes in just under two hours of performance time. The scenes take place across multiple locations. There are over thirty characters, most of which can be doubled or even tripled in casting. The action mixes between large scenes involving many actors in parliament debating the impact of the suffragette movement on society, to the middle-class home of Lady Cain, to the harsh realities of the Holloway Prison.

No matter how emotionally close or involved the audience gets in the loving relationship between Lady Cain and Eve, we are being constantly being dragged away back into the politics.

Cast and design

The characters are wonderfully well written and offer an exciting challenge to young actors. The two central roles are inevitably thought-provoking but there are also excellent characters around them. The mix of young suffragettes and the older political characters of Keir Hardy or Lord Asquith can be very demanding exciting for a multi-roling actor.

The play offers a great challenge to the designer too. With 31 scenes, across more than ten locations, including the House of Commons, street corners, houses and prison cells, there is a lot for the set or lighting designer to get their teeth into! The setting poses a challenging design brief for the costume, hair, and make-up designer too – it is important to keep the costumes both correct to the time period but also practical to move and perform in.

When performing the play, it is important to remember its relevant and powerful context. The context is a reminder of how far we've come as a society but at the same time helps us understand how far we have still to go. But it is also important to have fun, to remember the strength of the writing and enjoy the challenge of performing the lives of such complex and compelling characters.

Performance rights for Her Naked Skin are available from Concord Theatricals.

www.concordtheatricals.co.uk/p/9114/her-naked-skin