Fasten your seatbelts,

it’s going to be a bumpy night

When this stage adaptation of the classic 1950’s movie (which is in turn based on a 1946 short story by Mary Orr) was first announced, I wasn’t going to go—I’d just been to London twice the year before and in no hurry to be back. Alas, a play starring Gillian Anderson with music composed by PJ Harvey is just about the most on brand thing for me someone could come up with, so when the presale rolled around, I couldn’t resist, and snagged a (pretty darn fantastic) ticket. After all, I regretted not seeing A Streetcar Named Desire when Gillian starred at the Young Vic, and ended up planning a US trip to catch it in New York when it transferred to St. Ann’s Warehouse.

I didn’t watch the movie until after seeing the play, so I went in knowing only the most basic premise: An ingénue (Eve, played by Lily James) insinuates herself into the life of a highly regarded but aging Broadway star (Margo, played by Gillian Anderson), threatening her career and relationships. The play is two hours long, with no interval, which was a first for me, but makes sense for the story—with it originally being a film, there’s no natural point where you could split it in two acts.

I went in with no expectations—if anything, I was afraid to be let down, since I hadn’t managed to steer completely clear of reviews, and the consensus seemed to be that while the acting is stellar, the staging and score are intrusive, sometimes overwhelming. I mostly disagree (the only scene where I felt it was truly too much, visually, was during Eve’s award acceptance speech, I was so distracted I missed much of what she was saying), and thought that aspect unique and pretty well done, but you obviously have to be open for that more avant-garde kind of thing (and I can imagine that more seats than usual would have an obstructed view because of this set-up).

The beginning of the play (up to when Margo takes Eve under her wing and moves her into her apartment) is played on a scantily furnished, almost empty stage, with only a vanity table at its center, at which Margo sits, post-performance, smoking. Her back is to the audience, and as Karen introduces her to Eve, she speaks mostly into the mirror while the other characters present crowd around her. I thought it was a pretty effective way of showing that Margo is the big star and the center of the world, so-to-speak, while watching her slowly remove all her make-up also made her more… accessible and human. Thanks to a webcam installed in the mirror, we are shown a huge close-up of her face live on screens enclosing three sides at the top of the stage; the effect is eerie, as it gives the impression that she is looking straight at you while delivering her lines. Gillian is perfect for this part—she has such an elegant, graceful bone structure that reminds me of pre-Raphaelite paintings and Old Hollywood dames; she looks out of a different time, and while she definitely stepped out from under Bette Davis’ shadow and played her own Margo, she had the resting bitch face down pat, and her arching eyebrow and pouty mouth would’ve deserved an Olivier Award for outstanding acting on their own. This production is All About Gillian, to be sure, and it was all but impossible to look at anyone else if she was in a scene.

When the setting changes, the stage “expands”, and becomes more richly (but somewhat shabbily) furnished—the vanity table of the theater’s dressing room is just pushed to the back, not out of sight. Curtains rise and a “backstage area” can be seen, with Gillian’s headshots scattered on the bare-brick walls (as Eve’s rising fame starts eclipsing Margo’s, they are slowly replaced by Lily’s). You could sometimes catch a glimpse of stage hands moving stuff around or assisting the actors while a different scene was playing out at center-stage, which I really liked—it felt quite meta, with it being a stage adaptation of a movie that’s essentially a love-letter to the theatre world (and since the antagonism that existed between Broadway and Hollywood at the time is a pretty important aspect, it now being a play brings it full circle).

The kitchen and bathroom were “off-stage”, and scenes played in these rooms were shown on the screens via hidden cameras, which I also thought was pretty clever, since that’s where the most secretive of conversations take place, and this gave the feeling of eaves-dropping. One down-side of this multi-media staging, however, was the fact that the plot felt… untethered from time. At first, I thought it would be an updated, modernized version (I thought this based on the early press shots of Gillian and Lily I included above), but the dialogues are identical to the movie, so there’s still talk of WWII as something recent, which makes the screens and modern head-shots and birthday balloons feel anachronistic, which pulled me out of it a little and made it hard to immerse myself in the story. I had a lingering but persistent feeling of unease throughout the play, and I think this juxtaposition was one of the main reasons for it. If Ivo van Hove’s intention was to show that the cycle of ruthless ambition in the entertainment industry is a persistent and age-spanning problem, then he definitely succeeded!

One of the few changes made to maintain the play’s relevance today was adding ten years to both Margo and Bill, since a forty-year old woman having an existential crisis over her age would just no longer be very believable. So Margo is now a fifty year-old actress dating a man eight years her junior, and she’s definitely starting to worry what her advancing age will mean for her career in a business that’s inherently ageist, and also about her boyfriend leaving her for someone younger. The play chose to focus a lot more on her insecurity in this regard (at one point, there’s a close-up of Gillian’s face morphing into that of an old lady while Margo looks at herself in the mirror, and she starts screaming and sobbing), and a lot of the campy overtones of the movie, provided by Bette Davis’ portrayal, were lost in translation—Gillian mostly managed to retain the sardonic humor of the original, but loses much of the original Margo’s grace, at one point being so drunk that she slurs her lines before puking into the toilet bowl and passing out in bed, alone (absolutely brilliantly acted, however). I left the theatre wishing they’d focused more on the lack of interesting leading roles for older women, which would’ve made the play more timely and ultimately more feminist—the choice to focus on her advancing age felt like a step back. While the movie scene of Margo asking Lloyd to write her a good part is nothing short of iconic, with Bette Davis’ delivery both tongue-in-cheek and challenging, maintaining direct eye-contact, in the play it was delivered in passing, almost absentmindedly, just as Gillian was being helped out of her stage costume.

This lack of feminism is one of the main criticisms I’ve heard in regards to the adaptation, especially in this opinion piece published by the Guardian, which I can’t help but agree with as far as it concerns the changes made in the play—maybe a female director would’ve updated it in that regard, but I wouldn’t consider the original movie particularly “feminist”, not through our modern understanding of the word. Sure, all the witty lines belong to the ladies, their characters were complex and interesting, it remains the only film in history to have received four female acting Oscar nominations, the women are the first to see through Eve’s scheming, and Margo starts off as a self-assured career-woman… but by the end she gives a long monologue about the virtues of marriage and needing a man by her side to feel like a woman. She ends up accepting (settling for?) a more “traditionally female” role with poise, and I find that to be a tragic fate, rather than the mark of a feminist heroine. I’ve recently read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, published in the early 60’s, and I couldn’t help but think of it towards the end of the play, because what’s going on is so perfectly explained by her theory: Following the first feminist movement, after having won the vote, women took charge of their lives and went on to occupy traditionally male roles during the war. But following the men’s return, there was an increased societal pressure throughout the 50’s to resubmit to the patriarchal order, by giving up higher education and careers to find happiness and fulfillment in marriage and motherhood (aren’t the end of the car monologue and engagement toasting scenes the most perfect propaganda pieces to that end?), which a decade later would result in the general malaise of middle-class American women that Friedan referred to as “the problem that has no name”.

I’ve got to give it to Gillian, that particular moment, the car monologue, was brilliantly acted though. There was no car—they sat on the floor, by the edge of the stage, and the feeling she delivered those lines with redeemed her version of Margo, which, admittedly, I hadn’t found all that likeable… the role seemed a little ill-fitting, as if she were unsure of it herself (she admitted as much in an interview—that it took her four or five weeks to figure out who the character was), and also because, by comparison, Eve was made more sympathetic in the play. After having seen Anne Baxter’s Eve in the movie, I can’t help but think that Lily James, even though surely talented, was miscast for this particular role. She was convincing as a rabid fan, but much too girl-next-door, not aggressive, defiant, or unrepentant enough, too prone to crying fits when things didn’t go her way, and thus, easy to be seen as a misunderstood underdog mistreated by an irrationally jealous and acerbic Margo, rather than the unscrupulous bitch setting out to overtake the life of someone who felt protective of her in a rough business, where woman have to look out for each other. Rather than Lily, I was much more impressed by Monica Dolan’s Karen, who was indeed recognized with the Olivier Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Having just seen the gender-bent revival of Company two days prior, I was perhaps expecting too much, but that re-imagining proved that it’s possible to keep the spirit of the original intact while updating key points to make it more timely and relevant to a modern audience, and I really wish All About Eve had gotten the same treatment. I don’t want to be too harsh on (or unfair towards) Ivo van Hove’s vision though; after all, the dialogues were all but identical to the movie, and if Gillian Anderson and PJ Harvey are involved in a project, it can’t not be feminist in some way, shape, or form, even if you have to dig to find it—and despite what may have come off as cynical criticism, I really do think that the movie is a timeless masterpiece. Speaking of PJ Harvey, I quite liked her score, it was ominous and haunting in all the right places with her particular, unmistakable touch and a pulsating quality. The original song The Sandman replaced Liszt’s Liebestraum as the song a drunk and depressed Margo keeps requesting from the pianist at Bill’s homecoming/birthday party, with Gillian singing it in an off-key slur, while a second and stunning original song, The Moth, is sung by Lily James towards the end of the play, and really quite beautifully at that—I was honestly impressed by her singing voice, and if that was indeed her playing the piano (I couldn’t see her hands because of the angle), then she’s a pretty damn good pianist as well.

Not having seen the movie before the play, I was really taken (albeit not entirely surprised) by the ending, and while Gillian was positively glowing at curtain call, I felt like the standing ovation was rather hesitant, which fits the polarizing reviews I’ve since gone back to read. Gillian signed in the lobby (so gracious of her to do it! You have to leave the theatre and have a valid ticket for that day’s performance to be let back in). I’ve been a fan since I was a child, and since I couldn’t catch her after Streetcar, this opportunity all but made my night, and once I was in front of her I was a pretty tongue-tied fan wearing a heart-eyes-emoji for a face. Having just seen this particular play certainly added to the self-awareness and I couldn’t help but feel a little weird about queuing to get twenty seconds in front of an admired actress, but then again, the play is also a twisted love-letter to the inherent absurdity of stardom, so… a fitting conclusion, and I wonder whether the people who then go on to stalk her by the stage-door realize the irony of their actions, and I was a little ashamed of my attempts three years prior.

My final verdict, after reflecting on it for close to a month, is that it’s good, but not great. This isn’t due to any one single thing, but the sum of many little details that are hard to pin-point. Gillian is, of course, a brilliant, shining star, but I know what she’s capable of, and her portrayal could’ve had a bit more bite for my taste—I’m not too surprised she didn’t win the Olivier Award for Best Actress for this, while I’m still bitter that she was robbed when she was nominated for A Streetcar Named Desire. That performance and whole play literally took my breath away and had me in tears, while I had to sleep on this one to sort my thoughts, as I didn’t leave the theatre with an immediate gut reaction—perhaps that speaks for its complexity? Or for how brilliant Streetcar and Gillian’s Blanche was, which will now eclipse anything else she’ll ever star in? For what it’s worth, it hasn’t left my mind since seeing it, so something was definitely done right, and I’d absolutely go and see it again if I were local.

So many people know me. I wish I did.

I wish someone would tell me about me.