Engaging stage steam

Press, 1 June 1985, Page 20

Engaging stage steam

Steaming. By Nell Dunn. Amber Lane Press, 1985. 77pp. $9.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Paul R. Bushnell) With the release of this play, Amber Lane Press makes its publishing debut in this country. One of a series of plays by contemporary English dramatists, “Steaming” was given its first performance in July, 1981. A surprise and controversial hit in England, it has been reprinted several times since, and is being performed by the Court Theatre in Christchurch. What is all the fuss about? The play is set in a dilapidated Victorian bathhouse, and peopled with women who appear in varying stages of nudity. But for this aspect of the play, it would hardly raise an eyebrow, for in other respects it is a thoroughly conventional, even conservative, wellmade play. Naturalistic in style, it contains characters who — save for the two middle-class women — are engaging and convincing. Relationships between the women develop against a background of analysis of how they got on with the men who form part of their lives outside the bath-house. The feminist message in the play is suggested, but never becomes obstrusive because Dunn avoids the pitfall of caricature. While the play’s Characters are to some extent types,

they are individualised so well that by the end of the play the reader cares for them and what they say. The decay of urban London is skilfully evoked through the occasional reference to the living conditions of Mrs Meadow and her intellecutallyhandicapped daughter. For New Zealand audiences, this is particularly valuable in emphasising the social role which the weekly ablution at the bathhouse plays in the lives of its customers. The setting also provides a realistic opportunity for having a group of women from different social classes interacting, and it is in the resulting conversation that the play’s strength lies. The secondary plot-line involving the threatened closure of the baths by the local council seems superfluous by comparison. A resulting problem, of having the crucial council hearing reported rather than enacted, is not successfully resolved. This is a minor blemish on what is otherwise an affectionate and touching play. “Steaming” is not a great work of the contemporary theatre, but, in a thought-provoking and enjoyable way, it invites its audiences to consider women’s issues from their point of view. (“Steaming” is distributed in New Zealand by Scriptura Associates, Christchurch.)