Set in New York in the 1880s, post-Civil War and at the dawn of the age of electricity, Sarah Ruhl’s play In the Next Room, or, the Vibrator Play offers a funny and poignant account of connection, frustration and isolation.

Dr Givings (Jono Martin), a kind but overly-analytical scientist, runs a medical practice from his house, where he treats patients who are suffering from hysteria with a wonderful new invention – the electric vibrator. This vibrator, he has found, facilitates powerful paroxysms in his clients, which have a remarkably restorative effect.

Meanwhile, his charming and somewhat eccentric but frustrated wife, new mother Catherine (Amy Straker, luminous), slopes about the adjacent living room, full of energy but unfulfilled as wife, mother and emotional human being. 

Catherine connects with one of her husband’s new patients, Mrs Sabrina Daldry (Hannah Wheeler, a little daft and warmly comic) and their nascent friendship leads to them both giggling and experimenting with Dr Givings’ vibrators, all the while unaware that the sensations that they are feeling are sexual in nature. (Freud is historically just around the corner, too, with his proclamations that clitoral orgasms are infantile and immature.)

Melanie Luckman’s production is often slap-your-leg funny but those who come to the play looking for sexual titillation will really find themselves in a story about the way women have been excluded from (self-)knowledge and men’s spaces, and the ways we all struggle to connect with each other.

Ruhl’s nuanced and insightful script deftly gestures towards the ways that women’s bodies have been (and continue to be) historically and culturally framed as simultaneously lacking and ‘too much’, in large part because of our capacity to bear children. Written clinical statements about the inferiority of women’s bodies go back as far as Plato and Hippocrates, and the Greek physician Aretaeus thought of the womb as an ‘animal within an animal’. The history of hysteria, a disease of a ‘wandering womb’ made up of a grab-bag of nervous and physical symptoms, is itself a study in structural misogyny, even in present times where it has been reframed coyly as ‘conversion disorder’.

Meanwhile, whimsical Catherine cannot reconcile her mercurial nature and her verve with the fact that she is unable to produce sufficient milk to feed her infant; black wet nurse Elizabeth (Bianca Seinafo, powerful and dignified in the face of discrimination) is able to offer her abundant milk, and is seen by quixotic artist Leo (Fergus Inder, a joyous firecracker) as a Madonna-like muse, yet is a vulnerable second-class citizen.

Sabrina Daldry’s overwhelming hysterical symptoms sit against her unfulfilled desire to have a child and, like Catherine, she is suffering from a neglect that is framed as her problem and not her husband’s. The men, meanwhile, seem to bumble through in ways that are just as disconnected, although their comparative freedom and privilege is a little galling in its everyday nature. Mr Daldry (Matt Hudson, manspreading across the stage) deserves the slap he gets.

Most heart-breaking is how the characters are unable to recognise the ways that we are all constrained. Sure, lots of the humour comes from the fact that no one seems able to connect the vibrator’s clinical effects with female (or even male) pleasure. The most powerful moment for me is a small and sparse scene in which Annie (a marvellous Eilish Moran), the near silent midwife who assists Dr Givings, and Mrs Daldry have an exchange in which we see how quickly we are to automatically foreclose upon things that might bring us pleasure, connection or happiness.

This is the script’s power, I think, for in asking us to reflect on the way that cultural repression operates. We are also asked to consider the walls that we might be bound by, even if we are unaware of them, or don’t realise that we can walk straight through them.

Throughout everything runs the promise of connectivity and electricity, a modern marvel of great power and potential that might light up rooms and houses and cities, or kill an elephant stone dead for the benefit of watching scientists. Catherine flicks an electric lamp on and off for her baby with wonder; others struggle to look at the light until they’ve been ‘released’ by Dr Givings’ ministrations.

It’s late in the play where Dr Givings seems to come into his own, and we get a sense that for all his stiffness and awkwardness, it’s his own wife’s refusal to connect with him on his own terms, and to even feign interest in his passion for electricity and his work, that is as much a problem for their relationship as the era’s restrictive gender roles. Jono Martin’s emergent vulnerability, and his restraint and kindness, are highlights of the play, especially as the play initially and carefully positions him as a recognisable type of cultural problem: the ‘man of science’ who has a shamefully incomplete but powerfully controlling knowledge of women’s bodies as objects of inquiry. The play’s climax (…so to speak) is unexpected and humane.

The Court Theatre’s creative team does period very well and the production design is quite beautiful. Julian Southgate’s set is a richly textured marvel that slyly teases out the script’s interest in femininity, abundance and isolation, from the lush red velvet chaise, to the blousy curtains, to the somewhat suggestive patterns on the sumptuous wallpaper. The Givings’ living room sits next to Dr Giving’s ‘operating theatre’, the ‘next room’, where he applies his treatments with kindness and a humorous clinical distance.

The play’s use of these two distinct but continuous spaces, which are separated in part by an invisible wall, are a poignant way of touching upon separation and intimacy, and of acknowledging the ways women were (and still are) excluded from spaces. We are able to watch scenes play out simultaneously, in a juxtaposition that lends itself to both broad comedy and devastating sadness. It’s a powerful conceit, and one that is leveraged to great effect. Dr Givings’ clunky electric vibrators are also characters in their own right.

The costumes and wigs are similarly stunning, and cleverly flag character and status through cut and material. Nonetheless, very funny physical gags in which Catherine and Sabrina are constricted by their clothes, hopping on and off the examination table like bound mummies, sit at odds with their freedom of movement elsewhere, and Catherine’s love of action, especially her interest in racing about the clinic’s grounds.

There is much to admire about Giles Tanner’s lighting design, especially in the play’s poignant final moments, but I find some of the sound design curious. There is already some discomfort in the script over how servant Elizabeth, emancipated but in servitude, is presented as someone who is more in touch with her body and her sexuality (and sensuality) than the two white women, which dances into dangerous territory in which people of colour are framed as more embodied and less inhibited than their white counterparts. This production emphasises this distinction, rather than acknowledging its problematic nature and the attitudes of its characters, by playing joyous hand-clapping thigh-slapping black spirituals during the scene transitions – is the gag ‘thank you Jesus’, I’ve had an orgasm? Given the play’s gentle acknowledgements of power and discrimination, this choice seems clunky and unaware of its own contradictions.

There are still kinks in the pacing and action that no doubt will be ironed out as the production settles, especially as there is a strong contrast between the first, short, frivolous act, which feels a little unsatisfying, and the second, which is much longer and more complex in its storytelling, characterisation and scripting.

I can imagine there are challenges in terms of monitoring audience response, for while the play is often very funny, the titters and bellows of laughter also betray our own collective discomfort with talking out loud about female pleasure, or female anything really. It’s a beautiful show though, and a worthy one: funny, whimsical, sad, necessary, clear-eyed and as gently optimistic as a light that won’t burn out.  

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