The Drowning Girls

Not Waving but Drowning

The Drowning Girls

by Beth Graham, Charlie Tomlinson, and Daniela Vlaskalic

Teddington Theatre Club at the Coward Studio, Hampton Hill Theatre until 6^th July

Review by Andrew Lawston

Three white bathtubs sit in a row on a lino floor in Hampton Hill Theatre’s Noël Coward Studio, as Teddington Theatre Club prepares to do for the humble bath what Psycho did for the shower.

The Drowning Girls, by Beth Graham, Charlie Tomlinson, and Daniela Vlaskalic, tells the tale of three Edwardian women who were married, defrauded, and ultimately murdered by the same man.

As the ghosts of Margaret (Laura Eagland), Alice (Racheal Rajah), and Bessie (Martine Neang) each erupt, gasping, from their respective baths, and the audience receives a modest sprinkling of water.  The lighting is stark and harsh, the actors are wearing make-up to make their faces pallid and their eyes look sunken, leaving us in no doubt that their characters are dead.

The play’s subject is chilling, and the women spare no details in relating their grisly fates over the ensuing seventy minutes, but these three ghosts have also become firm friends in their watery purgatory, and frequently giggle together as they enact key scenes from their tragically abridged lives.

The girls are united by their loathing for their mutual husband, George Joseph Smith, who married each of them under a variety of pseudonyms, before convincing them to hand over their savings, to take out life insurance policies, and to change their wills in his favour.  All three are also estranged from their family to some extent.  Smith also convinced all three of them that they were suffering from health conditions, and encouraged them to visit doctors.

To a modern audience, all this gaslighting represents a flurry of red flags, of course, but Alice paints a stark picture of life for women in Edwardian Britain as she complains that she can’t vote, or speak, or show so much as an ankle, and is even scolded for using the word “arm” instead of “limb”.  Even in their ghostly state, the girls all agree that marriage is their only option unless they wish to end up like one of “those” women; a spinster, or a companion to an elderly lady.

Eagland, Rajah and Neang all give compelling performances, changing in a moment from unsettling undead women bursting from bathtubs into girls giggling as they act out a police chase, complete with the playground staple of using their steepled fingers as revolvers.  At another point, they act out Smith’s early life, with Rajah playfully shouting “steal”, “shove”, “swipe” as she imitates the murderer’s formative crimes.

Neang’s Bessie has a short scene where she plays a psychiatrist, reeling off lists of symptoms with which Edwardian doctors would diagnose women with “hysteria”, and even attempting to hypnotise Laura Eagland’s Margaret.

Shortly after this, Eagland receives hearty but nervous laughter from the audience with a darkly comic courtroom scene in which she plays a grimly cheerful champion swimmer, demonstrating the difficulty of drowning a human in a bathtub while leaving no signs of violent struggle or any opportunity for the victim to call for help.  This light moment then highlights the brutality of the subsequent scene in which Neang, as Smith, coldly drowns Alice.

Rajah’s Alice also excels as the lawyer demonstrating the impossibility of drowning women in a bathtub, as well as playing Bessie’s concerned aunt.  All three actors give a fantastic performance, despite barely having time to pause for breath in this show, and often acting while soaking wet from the water in the bathtubs.  One scene in which all three girls pull thick socks over their wet feet is clearly particularly challenging.  “Who invented these?” asks one of the girls.  “Men,” replies Rajah, deadpan.

Director Alexsandra Marzocca keeps the story moving at a brisk pace, with transitions marked mainly by dramatic lighting changes.  Props are concealed artfully around the plain set, often in the three bathtubs, so nothing interrupts the flow, except occasionally the audience’s laughter.

Each of the girls was isolated, the trio remark on several occasions during their narration.  But in their ghostly limbo state, apparently doomed to re-enact their tragedies in perpetuity, they have found solace in each other.  This is a chilling story whose impact is heightened by the production, but there is also a great deal of wit and a playful sense of fun that runs throughout.  It’s an intriguing and concise show, which is hugely entertaining and gives serious food for thought.  Highly recommended.

Andrew Lawston, July 2024

Photography by Kim Harding