Intimate Apparel, Donmar Warehouse review - stirring story of Black survival in 1905 New York

The corset is an unlikely star of the latest Lynn Nottage play to arrive at the Donmar Warehouse, 2003’s Intimate Apparel. After the more male-dominated Sweat and Clyde’s at the same address, this is a personal piece about the lot of Black women, inspired by Nottage’s discovery of an old photo of her great-grandmother Ethel.

She set about excavating all she could about Ethel, but there wasn’t much in print about Black women of the time. She knew Ethel was born in Barbados in 1870, arrived, alone, in New York City at 18 and married a man she had corresponded with while he laboured on the Panama Canal. The lack of details sent Nottage on a journey of discovery through the small ads in newspapers of the time.

There she found the makings of a seemingly simple drama with huge resonance. Her heroine is Esther (Samira Wiley), an unmarried seamstress from North Carolina; now 35, she is a boarder at Mrs Dickson’s guesthouse who has risen from extreme poverty to becoming the maker of exquisite undergarments and trousseau items for wealthy women, a highly lucrative profession. She stashes her savings in a quilt, ready to fund her dream of opening an elegant beauty parlour for Black women.

As Esther describes it, she lives a simple life, of going to church “for the company” and once a week visiting a Jewish fabric dealer, Mr Marks (Alex Waldmann, pictured below left), who keeps aside for her exceptional pieces of silk and lace. The results adorn the bodies of clients like the bubbly bored socialite Evangeline Van Buren (Claudia Jolly, pictured left), but also Esther’s flamboyant sex-worker friend Mayme (Faith Omole, pictured below right).

Esther is restless, however, watching other boarders marry and leave. When Mrs Dickson (Nicola Hughes) suggests she find a pen pal with prospects, Esther begins to send letters to George (Kadiff Kirwin, pictured bottom with Samira Wiley) in Panama – though she is unable to write them, or read his replies. For that she forms an increasingly strong bond with Mrs Van Buren, her proxy letter-writer, often with Mayme as her reader. 

Through the unusual form of her contact with her clients, Esther becomes a confidante, the only person allowed in Evangeline’s boudoir. Evangeline is s poster girl for marriage in the Gilded Age: a coquettish, rebellious woman who has a rich husband she despises. Romance has no part in her life. Neither does it in Mayme’s, until a (married) client arrives who breaches her defences. And Mrs Dickson, now a widow, had married the only man available, rather not marry anybody at all and is a cynic about men in general, George in particular: “This man is paper!” she pronounces.

But Esther is under his spell, moved by his vignettes about the hard-scrabble life of working on the Canal, where labourers regularly die. Esther seems to be a beacon of hope to him, and when he proposes, she accepts. As the first act ends, Esther in a wedding dress she has made from a delicate white lacy material specially saved for her by Mr Marks – whose attraction to her has become hard to disguise – the sense that she will be disappointed grows. 

This isn't solely a drama about failed love and thwarted dreams, however. The second act transforms Esther’s story into one of Black self-determination and identity. Her willpower proves formidable, and when she barks at George, “Do not touch me!”, a proud warrior has emerged (the first-night audience cheered and clapped her at this point). 

Leading an impressive cast, Wiley gives the calibre of performance that was a standout in the National’s Blues for an Alabama Sky and won her awards in television’s Orange Is the New Black and The Handmaid’s Tale. As always, she seems constantly wired, with her whole body in play, her posture upright and dignified while her face creases into ferocious scowls and angelic smiles. She’s a compelling mix of vulnerability and strength, and also very funny, as when she describes her sexual experience to George as, “I done some kissin’”.

Sexual tension is more palpably in the air with Mr Marks, he bolder than she, though always sadly aware he can’t cross an important line, as a man with an arranged marriage in prospect that’s not much different from Esther’s. Waldmann, like his character, keeps it light, but suggests a hinterland of hard graft, represented by the simple black suit Mr Marks wears, which has become, he tells Esther, a reminder of his duty to his family and “an act of faith`”.

It’s at moments like those that Nottage’s wider design becomes clear. Clothing here isn’t just a sign of social status, though the characters are fully aware of its importance; for worldly Mrs Dickson, for example, what you buy to wear is even more important than how you speak. What Nottage is especially focusing on are the undergarments worn by most women of the time – the ornate corsetry of the title that modern women came to see as a symbol of oppression. But here it is key to the look of a woman’s clothing, a vital foundation. 

Nottage doesn’t overwork the metaphor, but builds it up so that “intimate apparel” comes to mean the qualities that form a woman’s real identity, her secret desires, not just her public persona. These are the common denominator linking the Black seamstress to the rich white socialite and the prostitute, all potential victims of their menfolk. 

Lynette Linton directs the piece with her usual intelligence and sensitivity. The design (by Alex Berry) is austere, with a high gallery for George to speak from in the first act, connected by a ladder that serves as Mr Marks’s means of accessing his stock. Projections of old photos of Black Americans and handwritten letters appear on the back wall; scenery is movable – brass beds, a treadle sewing machine – props minimal. The spotlight inevitably falls on the intricate costuming and beautiful fabrics. There is beauty, too, in the singing the cast break into, especially the spiritual they hum at Esther and George’s wedding. That’s matched by a fun line in bawdy when Omole’s Mayme bursts into a full-throated, lewd number, and Mrs Dickson joins her, about the candyman whose sugar they want in their ovens. These are the twin poles of this stirring, engrossing piece: dignity and the robust humour you may need to achieve it.

• Intimate Apparel at the Donmar Warehouse until 9 August
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