Not since Miranda introduced the ‘Sex and the City’ girls to her rampant rabbit has the vibrator so dominated our screens and stages. In Channel 4’s US import ‘Masters of Sex’, ’60s sex researchers Bob and Virginia Masters apply instruments of self-pleasure to a succession of women. The 2011 film ‘Hysteria’ delved further into the vibrator’s history – to the Victorian era, when pioneering doctors first applied electrical machines to female patients in a bid to cure them of their ‘hysterical’ symptoms.
And this play by US dramatist Sarah Ruhl occupies very similar territory: our setting is 1880s New York state, where Dr Givings (Jason Hughes) is giving the vibrator treatment to patients in his home surgery – the ‘next room’ of the title – and inciting both curiosity and resentment in his wife, Catherine (Natalie Casey).
The play’s off-Broadway premiere brought multiple award nominations, and this production, directed by Laurence Boswell and transferring from Theatre Royal Bath’s Ustinov Studio, is impeccably staged. Simon Kenny’s opulent split-level design feels period-perfect, with gold curtains twitching back to reveal the stage, like the modesty screen behind which Dr Givings’s unsuspecting patients undress.
As patient Sabrina Daldry, Flora Montgomery rises valiantly to the task of repeatedly faking orgasm; and Madeline Appiah is outstanding as Elizabeth, the wet nurse Catherine employs to nurse the baby she can’t feed herself. Casey, as Catherine, achieves an engaging naturalism, though her twitching, high-energy performance soon starts to grate.
But despite some excellent comic moments, the play is ultimately unsatisfying – part comedy; part lyrical meditation on the mechanising effect of electricity; part exploration of the appropriation of the female body by both sex and childbirth. It flirts with all these themes, but doesn’t quite bring any of them to climax.
By Laura Barnett