Dry Land, Jermyn Street Theatre, review: The controversial play with an onstage DIY abortion

A back street abortion, which is left to the imagination of the audience, is pivotal in Harley Granville Barker's ever-topical 1907 play Waste which has just been marvellously revived at the National Theatre. An excruciating DIY abortion – brought off by two girls who are swimming team members avid to get college scholarships on the back of their sporting prowess – is the last word in visceral depiction in Dry Land. This play is the first full-length work by Ruby Rae Spiegel, who was a Yale undergrad of 21 when she wrote it. It's a remarkably accomplished and unsettling play about the viciousness and the vulnerability, the complicities and treacheries of friendship between two young female students who are less sophisticated and needier than they would like to think.

It would be a terrible shame if Spiegel, who clearly has huge potential, got saddled with the lazy tag of precocious succes de scandale merchant. She understands the nature and the penalties of precocity too deeply to deserve such shorthand and she trains a beady, undeluded – and implicitly compassionate – eye on the social and pressures in the world right now that are turning high-achievers into competitive monsters. Directed and co-produced by Hannah Hauer-King, this horribly funny, mesmeric and pity-inducing English premiere is super-attuned to the off-hand, sado-masochistic rhythms of the dialogue in the central relationship. The excellent design by Anna Reid traps us in the worrying atmosphere of a locker-room after hours.

open image in gallery

The focus is on two characters. There's Milly Thomas's superb Amy, clingy, morbidly thin as a result of the punishing regime, and now worrying that she is going to have one of the periods that were so late coming on the very day of a projected visit from the scholarship scout from a rich university. When we see her, it's not her sport she's practising, though but punches at the pregnant stomach of Ester, whose toying, slave-owner dominance over Amy is brilliantly communicated by Aisha Fabienne Ross as is Ester's underlying insecurities. Having despatched Amy to purchase some organic detergent, Ester makes sure that she is found nonchalantly perusing porn on the sidekick's return. Asked what the porn is like, Ester airly replies: “Kind of gross. But also kinda hot”. There's pathos in that would-be cool hedging of bets.

Spiegel has a great ear and a fine sense of prevailing social conditions. Even if Ester had a credit card, she wouldn't be able purchase enough of a particular, restricted drug because you would need a fake credit card to buy the second necessary stash and, inconveniently, the authorities now started to check like mad. I couldn't watch the appalling scene of the foetus's emergence again unless held at gunpoint. But morally it's less painful than the paunchy janitor who arrives later to clear up the mess and does so listening to music through his headphone as though this exercise were all in a normal day's work. An auspicious debut for Damsel Productions, the ironically named and inspiring new company dedicated to putting provocative, true and honest aspects of female experience centre stage.