Writer: Helen Edmundson
Director: Blanche McIntyre
When Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham’s Adolescence premiered on Netflix in 2025, it shone a light on the radicalisation of young boys, particularly in the light of social media influencers who reduce masculinity to an exhibition of extreme misogyny.
That series saw Graham as the father of a 13-year-old boy who is arrested after a girl at his school is murdered. The focus there is on the disconnect between generations, the parents aghast that the son they love could have descended into hatred without them knowing.
At first glance, Helen Edmundson’s Some Woman treads similar ground. Anne-Marie Duff’s stressed divorcée Julie is distressed after being verbally abused by an 11-year-old boy who appears to have also fallen prey to the assumption that it is okay to talk to women as if they are lesser. But after she attempts to contact the boy’s school to find some way of letting him know how upset he made her, events spiral, counter-accusations are made, and she ends up being charged with battery and making threats to kill.
Edmundson flits between wanting to expose misogyny, find a way to celebrate womanhood and motherhood, and to wallow in the misery of Julie’s home life – her younger daughter is struggling to complete university applications in the wake of severe depression, her older daughter is just generally vile, and her ex-husband hangs around like a bad smell.
Unfortunately, none of this is explored in a particularly interesting or compelling manner, especially in the play’s first hour. The dialogue is slow, drawn out, and so full of portentous pauses that even Harold Pinter might have urged them to get on with things. Hannah Onslow’s bitterness as elder daughter Kate seems deliberately meant to set everyone on edge, and it does: but then she is paired with Tobi King-Bakare’s cartoonishly buffoonish boyfriend, whose well-meaning puppy-dog manner never feels like it belongs in the same play.
Robert Jones’s set reduces Julie’s house to a single backdrop running across the back of the stage, expressing an average suburban open-plan kitchen-living room. The mundanity of that presentation is alleviated by placing it within a shell of concrete slabs, whose false perspective makes it feel as if the house is sitting at the end of a telescoping tunnel. As an expression of the claustrophobia and containment Julie feels as a single mother, it’s a far more effective dissection than anything Edmundson fits into the script.
As the play continues and Julie’s legal woes deepen, Duff’s already miserable character descends further into despair. The unfairness of the recommendation that she plead guilty to the lesser charge of battery in the hope that the more serious charges are dropped – while she claims nothing happened, CCTV paints a confusing picture that does not dispel accusations that she was pushing the schoolboy towards the edge of a railway platform – is hammered home with unoriginal regularity.
Perhaps the brightest spark comes when Stephen Wight appears as the boy’s father, making an unannounced visit to Julie’s home. In this one scene we see that the influencer that radicalised her young abuser came not from social media, but from his own family. Wight’s menace is palpable, and the sparring between him and Duff rises above the more banal elements of Edmundson’s script. Duff’s defence of womanhood and the offhand way Wight dismisses her arguments raise some valid points, but despite spirited performances, the play can’t quite overcome the sense that the writing doesn’t compel interest.
By the end, Duff’s character does at least manage some personal growth, insisting on being allowed to take up her own space. But as an exploration of women’s roles as mothers and in the wider world, Some Woman doesn’t achieve the same sense of self-belief. Instead of being a superb dissection of radicalised misogyny on the scale of Adolescence, we get a piece that gets caught up in itself. That ends up diminishing the valid points that Edmundson is so desperate to make.
Runs until 21 November 2026
