Ragdoll, Jermyn Street Theatre review – compelling and emotionally truthful

Oh yes, I actually do remember Patty Hearst. She was the American publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst’s granddaughter, who, at the age of 19, was kidnapped by the ultra-left Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974. Some months after her abduction, a bank’s surveillance video showed her participating in a robbery.

She seemed to have embraced the urban terror group, and was eventually captured and sentenced to jail. But what really happened to her in captivity? This is the question and the story which has inspired Katherine Moar’s Ragdoll, the follow up to her very successful debut play, Farm Hall, which started at the Jermyn Street Theatre, the “West End’s studio theatre”, before touring and ending up with a high-profile run at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.

Moar’s two-hander is about the renamed Holly, the kidnapped heiress based on Hearst, and Robert, her older hotshot lawyer. Both are celebrities: she is infamous because of her participation in the SLA bank heists; he is famous because of his courtroom successes and is living his best life, hugely well paid, flirting with women, meeting Hollywood stars. But the play begins not with the 1978 trial, but in 2017 when Robert contacts Holly after decades of silence because, in a neat reversal, he now needs her help. Abandoned by all his friends, he’s been accused of sexual misconduct. He’s also being sued by a dozen people. 

If you can accept this admittedly unlikely meeting, then the play stages an fascinatingly taut story which is told with satisfying ambiguity. Moar has scripted an older and younger Robert, and a younger and older Holly, bringing them together at the end in a beautifully staged collision of older and younger selves. Looking back on their lives from 2017, there is a sharp contrast: Holly seems stable and normal, while Robert is desperate and bankrupt. As this brisk 75-minute memory play develops, the events of the 1970s are revisited in a series of questions: who was responsible for Holly’s experiences with the SLA (she ended up as the girlfriend of one of the terrorists)? Why did Robert fail to secure an acquittal? Why did he drop her after her conviction? 

In the #MeToo decade, Holly has some acidic things to say about the sexual freedoms of the Jimmy Carter era: talking about the way she was locked in a closet and sexually abused by her abductors, she says, “How things change. Forty years ago, it was sex — now it’s rape.” By contrast, Robert is uncomfortable with her truth: “I hate that word,” he says. In 1978 his attitude to her abuse was scarcely sympathetic. In fact, he still blames Holly for her conviction: she was too calm, didn’t cry enough and didn’t seem sorry enough. Her version is that he was too high, on drink and on his own celebrity, to properly defend her. Moar gives us both sides of the story — it’s easy to reach our own conclusions. 

The question of why Holly joined the SLA after months of captivity is articulated by Robert in a typically dismissive way: the Velcro Theory, which says that young privileged and entitled Americans grow up with “no discernable beliefs” and then stick to the first ideology they run into. Other explanations, such as the Stockholm Syndrome and straight forward coercion and violence, are barely hinted at, which is a shame. Instead, the play is very good at showing how the younger selves of both Holly and Robert are strangers to their older sense of themselves. The past, especially for a recovered victim like her, feels like an unreal place. For the disgraced, and definitely unpleasant Robert, it seems like a lost paradise. 

Although Moar leaves much material unexplored, her dialogues are tightly written and the characterization is both believable and a bit depressing. The naïve young Holly, who finds herself at the centre of an infamous episode of urban terrorism, and the bullish young Robert, who lives as much for TV chat shows as for the cut and thrust of the courtroom, typify the darkness of the American nightmarish 1970s, with mentions of dead Kennedies, the Charles Manson family of female followers, and the Johnstown cult mass suicide. In 2010s, while Holly is able to make something of her life, Robert remains a rather nasty piece of work, sneering at her identity as a victim. 

Josh Seymour’s tight production is designed by Ceci Calf on a set crowded with Robert’s packing boxes as he plans to vacate his luxury Californian villa, and features a large leather sofa which cost some 50,000 dollars decades ago, and he neurotically thinks is simply too lovely to sit on. The cast is convincing, with Nathaniel Parker and Abigail Cruttenden as the older Robert and Holly, him frazzled, her puzzled, before both find their anger, while Katie Matsell and Ben Lamb play their younger selves. Although it’s improbable that this pair would ever meet again, Moar’s play is written with great theatrical confidence and is a compelling and emotionally truthful exploration of the legacy of the grim 1970s.

• Ragdoll at the Jermyn Street Theatre until 15 November 
• More theatre reviews on theartsdesk

• @AleksSierz