With more than a touch of Alan Bennett writing Talking Heads monologues for Thora Hird, 44 years ago Arnold Wesker wrote Annie Wobbler for Nichola McAuliffe (pictured below). A month ago, an updated version premiered in Edinburgh and now it’s at the Finborough Theatre, still in the hands of Ms McAuliffe, still making you note those shared initials and still making you laugh, perhaps a little guiltily, and wince, a little worryingly.
It’s very much the revisit as billed, since McAuliffe has added new material (Selfies! ChatGPT! Tinder!) and now delivers the three characters in chronological order. That encourages us to see the three women as a kind of composite everywoman or, at least, an everywoman whose life has forked in different directions to land in the here and now at differing ages with different stories, but united by themes. And they do emerge, organically rather than via the didactic sledgehammer too often favoured by less experienced writers.
We start with Anna, working class with an overbearing mother and a BA IN FRENCH FROM A BLACK BRICK UNIVERSITY, who is preparing for an evening with an overbearing man boasting a "better" degree, the swagger that comes from three years at Oxford and money. Anna is sharply perceptive and acutely self-aware, but she can’t escape from a lifetime of being not good enough, the accommodations she made with her mother about to be repeated with her new boyfriend. Even possessing the knowledge that this man (voiced by Alex Jennings with a continuous sneer), like so many of his kind wants an intelligent woman, but one who is not too intelligent, natch, she walks willingly into a date, and further, into a relationship, doomed from the outset.
I thought of a remark made to me by another father who, unlike me, had a daughter. He told me that advertising aimed at young women from childhood onwards had a single narrative. “Here’s what’s wrong with you. Here’s what will make it better. Here’s what you will become if you buy it.” Wesker’s Anna, with so much to offer, can’t escape that destructive path, having internalised her Imposter Syndrome from girlhood.
A quick change and we meet Annabella, an initially hesitant mid-market novelist who, with the passage of time, gains acclaim and wealth but, as the whiskey swigging attests, not happiness. James Naughtie is the voice of a Radio Fourish presenter who poses the same questions at different times in Annabella’s career, which she answers with varying degrees of honesty and patience, becoming ever more spiky.
She could be a middle-aged Anna, but it’s unlikely. She stands for a self-made woman who still cannot find fulfilment at least in part because she knows she is treating her public with a measure of contempt, hiding it behind a mask that is slipping, dangerously so. She is running away from a question that she fears, “What does a sixty-something woman do in this world?” It seems as urgent as it was nearly half a century ago.
Bag Lady Annie - based on the Wesker family’s cleaner after the war - mooches about Waterloo Station, stooped and sustained by cider and a certain patience from the stationmaster, voiced by Peter Straker. Her trolley, that contains all her worldly goods, flies the Union Flag and she often opines that “They’re funny people, foreigners” and half-resents and half-admires the “Jew people” in an old school EastEnders way. It’s racism about as benign as it gets.
If we speculate on what will become of Anna and ponder on the anomie slowly drowning Annabella, we also wonder about how Annie got here. She cannot read nor write, but was a willing worker who has somehow ventured a few stops down the Central Line and become lost in the only city she knows. Where is the social contract that accepts that people like Annie will always be with us and that they might need some emotional and financial support to find their way? In a transactional world of zero sum games, I felt the dread hand of AI and housing shortages pushing more and more Annies into a society that will not want them and for which they are ill-equipped to survive.
McAuliffe delivers these three women, three warnings almost, in a very punchy 75 minutes, running through a capacious toolbox of acting techniques. The face changes, the clothes too, the posture, the voice, the attitude, but she never reduces these characters to turns paraded for our amusement. The women, flawed as they may be, have a dignity, their own sense of decency and an inner strength that will see them through.
Well, it has from 1983 to 2026, though I rather fear that it may not be enough to get to 2069. But I guess I would have said that back in Mrs Thatcher's day too.
