Review: THE WOMAN WHO TURNED INTO A TREE, Jacksons Lane Theatre

Daphne longs to be a 'girl with class' and sees the judgment of others as her validation. She buys designer clothes she can't afford, spends time and money on her make-up and expunges thoughts of 'losers' from her mind. The trouble with all that effort is its inevitable retreat from anything approaching normal human discourse. She feigns cool detachment, but everyone can see that she's desperate; she acquires clothes in lieu of a personality; and she shuns anyone who falls short of her definition of 'class'.

Then the fir tree outside her window seems to draw nearer every day and her skin is getting hairier and pricklier - the natural world is intruding.

Swedish playwright and screenwriter, Lisa Langseth's one-woman monologue is a biting satire on the lives into which some young women can topple almost without realising it. Bombarded by advertising and a wider culture that insists on telling them of their 'faults' and then is equally insistent in telling them how to solve them (and how much it costs), confidence can fracture easily, self-esteem ebb away and loneliness, even in crowds, seep into every pore. Social media hardly helps, but these issues have been around for far longer than Insta.

Bathsheba Piepe commits wholly to the role, aggressive, abhorrent, angry and much else as Daphne's neuroses pile one on top of the other. Piepe's skill is in never losing the humanity of a woman who cannot find any stability in her mental or social life - even as we recoil from her bad thoughts, bad decisions and bad outcomes, we cannot condemn her. Never to break free of adolescent anxieties is a fate we can wish on nobody.

That said, the central premise of the play - that it can be impossible to connect even surrounded by technology and living and working in a world city like London - is somewhat undermined by the production itself, with its Greek director, Emily Louizou, its transnational creative team and its home within the New Nordics Festival. The nagging thought persists that if so complex a collaboration as this is possible, why can't Daphne (who has plenty going for her) find a single straightforward connection anywhere?

But maybe that's the message - it's not what's outside a person in terms of opportunities, it's what's inside a person in terms of confidence and perspective. Fir trees prosper in hostile environments because their cores are strong, but they can bend in the winds - perhaps all Daphne needs are the roots from which such strength and judgment can develop.

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