'Intimate Apparel' review — there is not a stitch wasted in this beautifully crafted show

Read our review of Lynn Nottage's play Intimate Apparel, starring Samira Wiley, now in performances at the Donmar Warehouse to 9 August.

Expert seamstress Esther crafts exquisite creations: delicate, imaginative, considered, and each one an expression of care for that person. The same can absolutely be said for Lynn Nottage’s utterly gorgeous gem of a play, first seen in 2003 and now revived with equal sensitivity and attention to detail by Lynette Linton. It’s a beauty.

It’s also an intensely personal work. Nottage discovered a rare photograph of her great-grandmother, who, like Esther, was a seamstress in New York at the dawn of the 20th century. Nottage couldn’t find much information about her (thanks to Black women being erased from historical record), so she has imagined a life for her.

The result is a drama so rich and compelling that you become invested, heart and soul, in the fates of its characters – especially Esther. At 35, she fears she will never be married, although she does have a thriving independent business, hard-earned savings, and a dream of opening a beauty salon that treats Black women like queens.

Then she receives a letter from an unexpected suitor: George Armstrong, a Caribbean labourer digging the Panama Canal. Esther is illiterate, so she enlists the help of two very different customers – society wife Mrs Van Buren, and vivacious Black prostitute Mayme.

This Cyrano exercise, along with Esther’s intimate work creating undergarments for women of all backgrounds (and entering their “boudoirs”) fascinatingly highlights the connections between them. All are disenfranchised in some respect by this punishingly racist, patriarchal society, and all have disappointments and desires burning within them.

Mrs Van Buren has been shunned by her husband because she hasn’t produced children, while Mayme, a talented pianist, makes a miserable living selling her body. Esther’s widowed landlady, Mrs Dickson, disapproves of her correspondence with George, but then she understands marital woe: her husband was an opium addict.

The darker themes are balanced by warm humour. Esther might construct sensual corsets but she’s also an innocent, and the absolutely luminous Samira Wiley is very funny at expressing Esther’s indignation whenever her confidantes nudge her towards romance. She also conveys an extraordinarily palpable yearning for love.

She has a warm rapport with each person in her life: the mother/daughter relationship with Mrs Dickson (the excellent Nicola Hughes proving here that she should absolutely succeed Sharon D Clarke as Lady Bracknell); the teasing sisterly bond with Faith Omole’s Mayme, who flips between fast-talking spitfire and open wound; and the nuanced rapport with Claudia Jolly’s Mrs Van Buren, who is likewise vulnerable in her loneliness, but has more power than Esther.

The play also has the hottest scene I’ve seen this year, and it simply involves two people running their fingers over silky material. Esther has a forbidden flirtation with her fabric supplier, observant Jew Mr Marks (an adorable Alex Waldmann), whose all-black clothing signifies his commitment to his faith and his ancestors. Kadiff Kirwan is magnetic as George – both the imagined version of him and the prideful reality. Everyone here is flawed but totally understandable.

Alex Berry’s design turns every piece into an eloquent signifier, whether the pedal-powered sewing machine at which Esther labours away, or each important article of clothing. There’s great use of music (including a fabulous naughty song), and the heady words from the poetic letters are memorably emblazoned on the back wall.

The production is riveting in its intimate study of the minutiae of women’s lives, and in exploring what constitutes value, self-worth, acceptance, family, and love, with various threads neatly tied up in a powerful second half. This is a perfectly crafted show: not a stitch wasted.

Intimate Apparel is at the Donmar Warehouse to 9 August.

Photo credit: Intimate Apparel (Photos by Helen Murray)