Modest – Kiln Theatre, London

Writer: Ellen Brammar

Directors: Luke Skilbeck and Paul Smith

Modest is not a subtle play. It deals with a battle royale between the men of the Royal Academy, played by a bevy of drag kings in top hats and caricature moustaches, dragging on massive cigars, and Elizabeth Thompson, talented war artist, would-be RA exhibitor, and, unfortunately for her, a woman.

The Royal Academicians don’t feel at all positive about women. When they relent sufficiently to allow one of Thompson’s paintings into the Summer Exhibition there’s an almighty fuss, crowds of excited people wanting to see the painting and a developing commitment to never let anything like that ever happen again. The Academy wins, the glass ceiling stays intact, and lots of women are very very sad because, apparently, the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition is the event on which their hopes for equality were focused. It isn’t a subtle play. Modest is additionally an ironic title. The main protagonist has a vast collection of her own trumpets, and she blows them all relentlessly.

There’s a bouncy energy to the piece, a lot of gurning, no character development whatsoever, and many torch songs with the auto-tune turned up to eleven. There is also an extraordinarily unsympathetic central performance by Emer Dineen as Elizabeth Thompson: self-serving, self-aggrandising, horrible to her friends, her supporters and her sister. Dineen is playing the part as written and as directed but it is a very strange concept. Being a role model and carrying the hopes of all Victorian womanhood should really be a sympathetic part. Not here, it isn’t.

It is hard to tell whether the portrayal of a real-life feminist pioneer as grotesquely unlikeable is a horrible misstep or a courageous adherence to truth-telling, but however spectacularly glittery their frocks, it is very easy to wish nothing but ill fortune to attend on Elizabeth, and that can’t really be Ellen Brammar’s intention. Surely.

The playing is robustly caricatured, the politics are very 70s agitprop in-your-face, and there are an awful lot of laughs generated by making a proper Victorian stuffed shirt get all 21st-century sweary. Indeed, anything anachronistic gets a full-throated response from a very enthusiastic audience. The acts of prophecy that give specific dates for the accession of the first woman to become an Academician in the Royal Academy or the first woman poet-laureate, are neat uses of twenty-twenty hindsight, but generally, there is a lot of riotous love for contemporary references shoe-horned into the mouths of period characters.

There are pink and glittery gestures towards drag-show energy and drag-show pizzazz. There is a singularly half-hearted attempt at drag-show outrageousness, but in the end, all attempts to camp it up are undercut by the attempt to tell a true tale – whenever the outrage gets going, the play reverts to its foundational story, and crashed to the ground between two stools.

Middle Child theatre company have journeyed down from Hull with the avowed aim of giving folk ‘a good night out with big ideas’. Unfortunately, the good times and the big ideas get in each other’s way.

Runs until 15 July 2023