Intimate Apparel will make you fall in love with theatre again

Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel is a slow but enormously humanising and beautifully acted play about a seamstress thinking she had found love around the turn of the last century after a long-distance relationship with a man engaged with digging the Suez Canal.

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Neither are literate and have others write their florid love letters to each other, and, inevitably, when they meet, it all goes tragically wrong. Samira Wiley – probably best known for the Emmy-winning The Handmaid’s Tale on television – offers a haunting portrait of dignified pain in the role of the seamstress and Kadiff Kirman injects an all-important hint of vulnerability in the brutal philandering man she foolishly marries.

There is a dreamlike quality to Lynette Linton’s direction – the characters seem to be sleepwalking towards their respective fates – and the design by Alex Berry is suitably stylish. A play that helps us to understand the human condition. While this is something the executives at Disney will never even begin to understand, there is no higher purpose in theatre.