Writer: Sally Rogers
Director: Nigel Douglas
Janice is at a fork in the road. Will she fulfil her dreams of escaping her northern working-class community or will she succumb to the gender expectations placed on a girl like her in Sally Rogers’ new play set in 1981, The Still Room? As if there is any choice at all. “Everybody’s decided who we are and we’re only young” – Janice is trapped.
Waitress Janice and best friend Karen are serving at a hotel restaurant when new girl Diane from the posh part of town disrupts their equilibrium. Suddenly Janice is no longer the most impressive person in the room, Diane’s settled sense of herself and quiet upward mobility causes ripples among the staff pushing Janice to more extremes of behaviour as she collides with her destiny by trying to avoid it.
Rogers sets her play across three days in July 1981 when the wedding of Charles and Diana is bookended in this Stockport hotel by a golf club dinner and a beauty pageant. Her themes are the limited opportunities available to young women like Janice and the ruinous sexual assumptions that align their class with their future. All of this is borne out by the ways in which the men in the play behave, treating Janice as an object, calling her derogatory names and reminding her of the inevitability of her place. Only Janice is a virgin and none of the things her background and accent say she must be.
But in executing this over-long play, Rogers’ characters are obsessed with that virginity, talking in loops about where and when to lose it and the sex lives of other characters, from long married Bernice to the more liberated Diane – whose own experience is not judged. But it does little to advance the plot much of the time and, across 2 hours, The Still Room struggles for tone. It is not an outright farce, not quite a black comedy but nor is it exactly a character piece. Rogers’ Act Two finale is a strange mix of serious injury and public sex act which feels tasteless and ill-judged (and could easily have taken place elsewhere with the same outcome), although it evokes gales of laughter from some.
There are interesting specificities of language in The Still Room that reinforce Rogers’ understanding of class and era like references to the Happy Shopper store, BHS and the memories of the royal wedding that are particularly evocative and the central character, though loud and sometimes poorly behaved, is well drawn, the agent of her own self-destruction, giving her an underlying naivety that is appealing and sympathetic.
Played by Kate James, Janice wants to be a go-getter, almost the first thing she says is “we need to do great things” but over the course of the play James shows how greatly the odds are stacked against Janice, how her own fear of having to make a move paralyses the character. Janice can be cold and cruel, even reckless but James shows that at least some of the barriers that her character faces she has created for herself.
Other characters are not as well defined. Zoe Brough’s Diane is largely written to be a contrast to Janice – nice, well-spoken and wealthy – and although Diane starts to fight back, too little room is given to her own development. Jane Slavin’s Bernice has an unnecessary emotional scene in Act Three that the light characterisation hasn’t earned while Chris Simmons’ Kevin feels like a sitcom character in a more a serious drama.
The play springs to life at the beginning of Act Two when full dinner service is in motion as characters rush between unseen kitchen and dining room while trying to watch the TV in between. More of that energy would help the lacklustre first act particularly giving the precious few moments in the Still Room an even greater poignancy.
Runs until 25 June 2022
