In Georgina Deri’s production of Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 play, Machinal, there is a lot of discussion of hands. The Young Woman, as our main character is referred to in the script, is praised repeatedly for her hands – and Inge-Vera Lipsius’s fantastic attention to detail in portraying the Young Woman is perhaps best exemplified if we focus on her hands which constantly clutch at bedsheets or clothes, are placed under other hands, or slammed onto tables in moments of absolute crisis.

The play follows this Young Woman, on a sliding scale of a breakdown, from workplace frustrations and panic attacks to outbursts at home, through an unwanted marriage and a frantic affair, to a crime less of passion and more of desperation. A key motif in the play is the need for freedom, and the Young Woman convinces herself that killing her husband is the only way for her to be truly free. 

The most brilliant moments are the Young Woman’s desperate soliloquies, internal monologues that are conveyed to the audience, even as life goes on around her, in a way reminiscent of David Tennant’s Hamlet. Again, we return to hands – in these moments of internal madness, she fixates on her Husband’s ‘fat hands’ which seem to crawl all over her like worms when she is wrapped up in herself and her monologues. There is a particularly gruesome moment where she is almost startled out of herself by ragtime jazz, helpfully bringing us back into the period, which the music does throughout the play. The lighting is also important in terms of setting, with projections on screens providing locations throughout the play, or dimmed to focus in on the Young Woman’s thoughts.

"A key motif in the play is the need for freedom."

The pure nervous energy that comes from deeply repressed fury, frustration and fear that Lipsius conveys is spectacular. She is riven by the deep-set anxieties of her character, incredible to watch, and yet never overwhelmed or overtaken by her emotions. It is a curious thing to see – Ross McIntyre plays the Husband as a man inept but ultimately benevolent, and yet, in the grip of postpartum depression, the Young Woman finds him physically revolting to be around, gagging at his presence in the hospital ward.  

Initially, I struggled to see quite why she was so revolted by the Husband, and, cruelly, wondered if it was a flaw in the performance, feeling the Husband to be lacking the revolting lechery of a character like Austen’s John Thorpe. As the play progressed, it became clearer that he is not a character we, the audience, are meant to loathe – in fact, we begin to feel sympathy for his bewilderment in the face of his wife’s embedded anxiety. The Husband is not personally deeply flawed, but rather an unfortunate product of his environment and circumstances.

The Young Woman’s lover, Dick, tells her that her emotional freedom is attainable - she just needs to meet the right man. Her delight in being with him, in a beautifully intimate post-coital scene, transforms her whole performance – and yet ultimately Dick (played by Charlie Saddington with an easy, beguiling roughness that wins us over as an audience almost as quickly as he wins over the Young Woman) is responsible for her conviction, so perhaps even worse than the Husband.

There is also, underneath it all, a commentary on female repression. There is a slightly jarring conversation in a bar between two women, one of whom is urging the other to seek an abortion which, though important, does not quite seem to fit within the context of the scene it’s in. The walls of the Corpus Playroom are plastered with front-page headlines of stories about women, including the grimly sensationalist image of Ruth Snyder, on whose trial and eventual death by the electric chair the play was based. The Young Woman speaks so often of freedom that we cannot help but think how she is trapped. Not only is she trapped as a woman in a society that discriminates against her on the basis of her gender, she becomes trapped in a marriage organised not for love but for financial support, seeking that key word – freedom. She fails to find it – yet to divorce him would return her to another prison of an oppressive workplace and interminable financial system, so to kill him seems, in her desperate mind, the only way forward. Interestingly, in the Snyder case, she took out an incredibly large insurance policy on her husband’s life, so stood to benefit hugely financially from his death – this is not referenced in Machinal. The focus is only ever on that one word, freedom, and what it means to be free.