Review: 'In the Next Room, or the vibrator play'

State Theatre Company of South Australia, Dunstan Playhouse, 3 - 24 November 2012. Written by Sarah Ruhl. Directed by Catherine Fitzgerald.


It was only as recently as 1952 that the condition of hysteria was struck off the books of the American Medical Association. Affecting mainly women, hysteria had for hundreds of years previously provided physicians with a catchall diagnosis for a usefully slippery array of symptoms: nervousness, irritability, fainting, loss of sexual and other appetites and – my favourite – a ‘tendency to cause trouble’. Plato, who defined the female uterus as a living creature that could move around the body and cause blockages and disease, provided one of the earliest theses on the condition. As early as the medieval and renaissance epochs, ‘pelvic massages’ were recommended as a cure. The discovery and domestic application of electricity did not change the theory, but merely allowed for a different kind of massage, one that would outdo even those provided by the hydrotherapy devices which had become popular at bathing resorts during the 19^th century. I am talking, of course, of the electromechanical vibrator.

            Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room, or the vibrator play is a fictionalised account of the invention of the ‘aid that every woman appreciates’, in which gentleman and scientist Dr. Givings (Renato Musolino) is in the midst of trialling his two masturbatory machines on a new patient he has diagnosed with hysteria, the haughty but fragile Sabrina Daldry (Lizzy Falkland). Givings’ irrepressible younger wife, Catherine (Amber McMahon), listens with increasing curiosity to her husband’s therapy sessions in the next room, even as she must care for their newborn daughter. A second patient later arrives in the form of bohemian painter Leo Irving (Cameron Goodall) who, it transpires, is not immune from Dr. Givings’ incautious diagnosing of hysterical behaviour.

            Ruhl’s comedy is in essence a one-joke affair. The joke goes like this: a patient (an uptight woman! A man! The Doctor’s own wife!) gets the vibratory treatment and the attendant moans and groans cause one or more suitably eyebrow-raising facial expressions to occur in the adjoining room. It’s only mildly funny in the beginning, and much less so after the fiftieth variation, and it makes one wonder why Ruhl never reaches for the all-out-comedy button. It is a play that provokes titters of laughter but given its uncomfortable subject matter should be able to do better. There is too much restraint in the writing, and not enough wit. Ruhl’s solution to this problem is to hedge her bets by weaving in an underwhelming ‘serious’ subplot involving the hiring of an African-American wet nurse (Pamela Jikiemi) for the Givings’ baby. The nurse’s story, and her relationship with Catherine, feel undercooked and rather than win the audience’s empathy seem only to attenuate the play’s comic potential.

            The script’s tonal unevenness makes director Catherine Fitzgerald’s job more than usually difficult, and it shows in the performances which fail to cohere. Musolino plays Dr. Givings consistently as the piece’s straight man but McMahon’s more broadly drawn characterisation clashes with rather than complements his stiffness. Goodall, meanwhile, seems to think he’s in a Feydeau farce. Adding to the confusion is Ailsa Paterson’s garish design which unaccountably sees Falkland and McMahon attired in patchwork monstrosities reminiscent of Colin Baker’s 1980s Doctor Who. Why? And why, while I’m at it, the retina-searing art nouveau wallpaper?

            To be fair, none of these criticisms are meant to imply that this production is no good. The performances, though disparate, work on their own terms and the design aspects which adhere to period convention rather than a desire to be noticed are also successful (Dr. Givings’ vibrators may be heaven to feel, but they’re also marvellous to look at with their lovely brass fittings and tasteful gilded edges). No, the biggest problem is Ruhl’s script – not witty or silly enough to function as the kind of rollicking period comedy it seems to sometimes aspire to be, and not smart or reflective enough to work as an exploration of the politics of female sexuality in the 19^th century.

What we are left with is an unsatisfying compromise that longs for either more or less mirth. It all ends with a Richard Curtis-style melange of feather-light bawdiness and something like camp, complete with thumping pop song and falling snow. The play’s final blow is one not struck for women or their bodies, as far as I could see, but for a heterosexual, Hollywoodised ideal of machine-free romantic love. It reeks of a copout, a capitulation to the seeming necessity of a happy, apolitical ending at the expense of something more insightful, something which may have brought the story of the vibrator up to date by demonstrably recasting the device not as a tool for the further subjugation of women by men, but rather as a conduit for the enhancement of female sexual stimulation and pleasure. Ruhl’s play misses quite a few tricks, but this surely is the most unforgivable.