Theatre Review: The Smile of Her (Marylebone Theatre)

Reviewing her Oscar-nominated supporting performance in Jonathan Demme's Swing Shift back in 1984, Pauline Kael described Christine Lahti as "one of the towering Venuses who are changing our image of women. Like Sigourney Weaver, Joanna Cassidy, Kathleen Turner and, of course, Vanessa Redgrave," Kael continued,

"[Lahti] is heroically feminine. She's also a rip-snorting comedienne, and she gives [Swing Shift] whatever spark and intensity it has."

‎‎Over 40 years on, Kael's great descriptions hold true for Lahti on stage, where she continues to "change our image of women," this time with a deeply personal work. 

(Photo: Mark Senior)

This summer the actress/writer/director is making her quite unexpected but very welcome London theatre debut in The Smile of Her, which premiered three years ago at the Berkshire Theatre Group's Unicorn Theatre in Massachusetts, in a production by Robert Egan.  

Unlike Susan Sarandon's very low-key first foray onto the UK boards last year as one of the five incarnations of Mary Page Marlowe, Lahti's stage debut here could hardly be bolder or more self-revealing. Not only is The Smile of Her self-penned, it's also intensely confessional; the play takes off from Lahti's book of autobiographical essays True Stories from an Unreliable Eyewitness (2018), which in turn originated from her performance of some of those pieces as monologues in small NYC venues. 

(Photo: Mark Senior)

The Smile of Her comes to London in a fresh, tweaked new production by Mêlisa Annis at the Marylebone Theatre. Girl-group pop warmly welcomes the audience into the show before Lahti, casually resplendent in red, takes to Sarah Beaton's spare, sofa-dominated set to begin her story.   

The female-fronted creative team seems appropriate for a play that feels very much of the #MeToo moment in its focus on Lahti's feminist awakenings. These are explored as they occurred on the home front - in memories of her middle-class Michigan childhood, her siblings, her authoritarian father and compliant mother (to whom the title refers). And also in the professional arena as she recalls her first forays into acting - inspired when she saw a production of Long Day's Journey Into Night and headed to New York, "where all bad bitches go to make their dreams come true."

Across 90 compelling, cathartic, frequently funny and sometimes gut-wrenching minutes, Lahti reveals her growing awareness of the power dynamics in her family and the wider inequalities they point to, and recalls some disturbing encounters with industry men. (Though celebrated by Kael, Lahti's height definitely wasn't considered an asset by some of those in power in her chosen profession.)

(Photo: Mark Senior)

The Smile of Her isn't quite a monologue. As well as serving as audience-addressing narrator, and  playing her family members in quick, revealing sketches, Lahti also interacts with her childhood self (well played by Isabella Ford). With notable wit, fierceness and generosity of spirit, Lahti moves fluidly between roles, moods and perspectives, keeping the proceedings pacey but also nuanced and thoughtful (she also dealt elegantly with a tech hitch on the night I saw the show). 

The language is sometimes crude, sometimes lyrical; pitched somewhere between Fleabag and The Year of Magical Thinking, the show emerges as something distinctive: part memoir, part drama, part social history, part therapy. 

Looking back, Lahti's film choices often displayed a feminist bent - the aforementioned Swing Shift, plus Housekeeping (1987) and Leaving Normal (1992), for instance. While it's fun to see some footage of her hilarious 1998 Golden Globes win, I'd have loved to hear more about her particular experiences on those films instead. 

But maybe Lahti prefers to be quite vague about aspects of her career in order to avoid solipsism and to give more space to the audience. For, ultimately, it's the family dynamics that cast the longest shadows here, as Lahti movingly honours the traumas experienced by two of her sisters and details a reconciliation with the mother who her college consciousness-raising had distanced her from. 

As a work of contemporary feminism, The Smile of Her is intergenerational but not "intersectional"; it might be viewed as an example of what's these days sometimes fashionably disparaged as "white feminism." Perhaps such labelling, with its reversed hierarchies of value, only serves to create more division, though.  Part of what the play conveys so powerfully is the Second Wave tenet that our most intimate, affective experiences often shape our political consciousness - and how our perceptions can shift over time. 

Lahti tells us at one point that she was drawn to acting for its ability to explore all of life's "messy, ugly and beautiful" aspects. Drawing on painful personal experience to deliver one of the year's essential stage performances, she ensures that The Smile of Her conveys all of that in spades. The show comes warmly recommended. And here's to Lahti's return to London after this run ... Long Day's Journey Into Night, anyone?

The Smile of Her is at Marylebone Theatre until 29 August. Further information here.