Writers and Directors: Kitty Evans and Safia Lamrani
At the end of Little Women, the sisters find their lives changed forever by the circumstances of the novel, but Louisa May Alcott couldn’t leave it there and offered a sequel set a few years on. Now, Kitty Evans and Safia Lamrani add their perspective by relocating the siblings to the modern day to discover that despite marriage, the opportunity to leave home and the freedom of a university education, these Four Sisters cannot escape themselves or each other.
This 50-minute one act play, running at the Hope Theatre as part of Camden Fringe, takes some of American literature’s most beloved female characters and doesn’t quite know what to do with them. Beth is doing a business management degree while playing in a band and shares a London house with Amy who paints. Meg dotes on her husband Richard as she tries to be the perfect housewife while Jo pursues an unspecified feminist writing career but resents being left behind to care for their mother.
Evans and Lamrani gather the women together for one night only on the pretext of celebrating Beth’s 21st birthday which gives them the chance to air their grievances – except there is only one, the absence of three of the sisters from the family home. With few revelations across the piece and characters left exactly where we found them, Four Sisters lacks a dramatic purpose and drive to meaningfully bring this collection of independent events together.
The writers offer eight distinct scenes, some only a minute or two long in which various combinations of the sisters catch-up on their woes ranging from their incredulity at Meg’s marital routines to Amy’s fears about boyfriends and a scene entirely dedicated to Beth opening birthday presents. The contemporary setting works well, giving reason to the slightly scattered nature of the siblings and their waning knowledge of one another, but without a clear end point in mind the tone wavers between angry, profound, comic and melodramatic.
Of the characterisation, Meg is probably the most distinctly drawn of the sisters, wanting a simple, domestic life and drawing comfort and a calm release in caring for her husband – a trajectory that most closely follows the original novel – and it is no surprise that she is the most eager to escape the weekend. Played by Evans, there is a softness to Meg but she is never presented as foolish whatever her sisters think of her, capable of arriving at her own rational decision about the life she wants.
The other women feel more limited, reduced almost to a single adjective. Lamrani’s Jo is ‘the tomboy’ which makes her loud and overbearing, building to a slightly screechy confrontation with her family members. Olivia Denton’s Beth is ‘the boring one’, something she is frequently reminded of, but we see very little beneath the surface, and Pippa Walton’s Amy is ‘the baby’ who rather sits on the edges of the drama while her older sisters squabble.
There is room for a contemporary stage interpretation of Little Woman and this production has a good basis but Four Sisters needs to be expanded and shaped if it’s going to really bring these characters to life. The best place for Evans and Lamrani to start is to consider why Alcott’s women continue to speak to us 150 years on and what they have to tell us about living as women now.
Runs until 19 August 2021
Camden Fringe runs from 2 to 29 August 2021
The Reviews Hub Score
Lacks drive
