Monument

A make-up artist arrives at a politician’s hotel suite to make the politician ‘look good’ on a very important day.  The forty-something politician, Edith (Sarah Sutherland) is that morning to launch herself, making her first speech as the new Prime Minister, succeeding her revered and very popular father. 

Is the twenty-something make-up artist, Rosie (Julia Hanna), awed by this?  Intimidated?  Not in the slightest.  She’s young, confident, good at her job and she knows it.  She’s done all kinds of celebs, movers and shakers.  She might come on a bit coarse, a bit vulgar, even naïve, but she’s crazy like a fox.  Today, she has ninety minutes to do her thing. 

Edith arrives from a shower in a white bathrobe as defensive armour.  She’s brusque, anxious, almost panicky.  She tries to assert superiority from the start by treating Rosie as a mere servant and, anyway, her advisors have established the ‘look’ she’ll present that day – as on the cover of a glossy magazine she shows Rosie.  Rosie’s not impressed by that either.  She knows better – also about which is the best outfit from the ten or so on a rack beside them.  The battle begins.

The apparently yawning gap between them – of age class, status, wealth, insider-dom and history – will close – and open – and close – and…  Edith carries the weight of tradition, the past, responsibility and of keeping up appearances.  Rosie’s insouciance is a cover for seething rage.  She’s a creature of now, Edith is of the past.  Each in their way is a cynic.  But phone calls from Edith’s husband and one brief one from Rosie’s boyfriend tell us such a lot with remarkable economy.  Rosie’s persona change during her phone call makes the audience wince and their hearts sink.  Despite the gap, both know what it is to be a woman. 

There’s more than bickering and banter between the two.  The production had a make-up advisor, Harriet O’Donnell, so Julia Hanna really looks like she knows what she’s doing.  By the end, Edith’s hair and make-up look great – just not quite as she expected.  We see that peculiar, quickly established and often hugely presumptuous intimacy between a make-up person and their subject.  When your face is that close to another – and you communicate via a mirror – status and barriers do fall away.  A lovely and resonant choice here is that the audience is the mirror. 

Sophie Woodward’s set is not what you’d find in a luxury hotel suite.  It’s curiously metaphoric: a kind of flat-topped tower and you have to go around and climb to get to the top.  It’s all pink – curtains, surfaces, steps - which at the moment cannot help but remind us (and appropriately too) of the superhit movie, Barbie.  Because this is very much a play about women, about the stereotypes, the role playing, the pretences and subterfuges – and in this case, how to be a woman and achieve and hold onto power and some agency. 

To say more would be to give away too much, give too many spoilers of the twists and turns and reveals of these two beautifully realised characters and their shaping pasts. 

A hint, however, at just one aspect is where Rosie observes (as I remember it): ‘There’s a lot of drama in my family – in yours it’s melodrama.’  Edith asks: ‘What’s the difference?’  Rosie: ‘Money.’  In its way Monument is a play about masks and taking them off.  Rosie’s there to give Edith a mask.  What happens is not what we expect.  It’s very funny and it’s very serious.

Sarah Sutherland and Julia Hanna are perfectly cast for their characters in manner, age difference and appearance.  Ella Caldwell’s clearly sympathetic and insightful direction brings out every nuance and every reveal is striking and truthful.  Two women in a hotel suite for ninety-five minutes?  Yes.  Emily Sheehan’s text holds the audience totally engrossed, hanging on every word.  For Red Stitch, Monument has a relatively briefer season than usual.  Don’t miss it.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Jodie Hutchinson