“Intimate Apparel” at Donmar Warehouse
Neil Dowden in the West End
1 July 2025
Double Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage is back at the Donmar Warehouse for the third time. Following her successful productions of Sweat (which transferred to the West End) and Clyde’s Lynette Linton returns to direct Nottage’s 2003 lyrical play Intimate Apparel. This is different in that it is set in a historical setting rather than the present – New York City in 1905 – but it too examines blue-collar workers (especially African Americans) struggling to make a living and find fulfilment against the odds. The show is boosted by an outstanding cast led by US stage and screen star Samira Wiley as an economically independent seamstress who yearns for love in a moving story of dreams and betrayal.
Set by Alex Berry.
Photo credit: Helen Murray.
Esther specializes in sewing finely embroidered “intimate apparel” – women’s undergarments such as corsets – that are much sought after, with her clients ranging from wealthy white patrons to black sex workers. She has saved a considerable amount of money in the 18 years she has been working industriously while living in a rooming house – with the cash sewn into the quilt on her bed – and plans to opens a black beauty parlour.
But whilst other residents have married and leave, she feels left on the shelf at 35. Although she is drawn to the shopkeeper from whom she buys her fabric, his Jewish Orthodoxy means they cannot be together. Meantime she starts receiving letters from a Caribbean man labouring on the Panama Canal whose attentions become increasingly romantic. She agrees to marry him even though they haven’t met – a decision with momentous consequences.
Intimate Apparel is a subtle, slow-burning drama where not a lot seems to happen in the first half of the play but it skilfully builds up a sense of emotional anticipation that after the interval leads to a devastating, quiet tragedy as well as extraordinary, everyday stoicism. Esther’s naivety makes her touchingly vulnerable but her determination gives her inner strength. Inspired by finding a photograph of her unknown great-grandmother that led to researching her background and the backgrounds of those like her, Nottage is undoubtedly interested in the divisions around gender, race, and class, but she explores these themes in a complex patchwork of delicately stitched elements where the essence lies in the nuanced detail.
Racism is inevitably a part of the society in which Esther lives, yet this is not presented in any obvious or stereotypical way. Through incredibly hard, skilful work, she is financially (though not emotionally) self-sufficient, as is her widowed black landlady Mrs Dickson, with whom she enjoys a close, supportive relationship. Her client Mayme is also her best friend though she disapproves of her work as a prostitute, whilst the amiability of unhappily married Upper East Side socialite Mrs Van Buren turns into a confiding intimacy that makes Esther deeply uncomfortable. She shares a deep love of beautiful fabrics with the Jewish salesman Mr Marks, who reciprocates her feelings but is waiting for his arranged fiancée to immigrate from Europe. And the Barbadian George whose stories of working in South America evoke an exotic sense of adventure turns out to be far from her dream man.
Samira Wiley and Claudia Jolly.
Photo credit: Helen Murray.
Linton (who recently stepped down as artistic director of the Bush Theatre) does full justice to the play’s interweaving strands, in a beautifully modulated production that allows us to feel some sympathy for each character. Alex Berry’s excellent design suggests a dilapidated tenement building featuring opaque windows and discoloured walls, with Esther’s sewing machine (complete with pedal and wheel) centre stage, then later a marital double bed covered with an ornate quilt, while Mr Marks uses a stepladder to access colourful swathes of cloth from the sides of the stage and George initially cuts an imposing figure on a balcony above the stage. Gino Ricardo Green’s video sensuously immerses the set in the handwritten letters sent by George to the enrapt Esther.
Wiley (star of The Handmaid’s Tale and Orange Is the New Black on TV and directed by Linton in Blues for an Alabama Sky at the National Theatre in 2022) gives a wonderfully luminous performance as Esther, her expressive face and body running the gamut of emotions as her hopes are crushed but not her spirit. Nicola Hughes exudes positive energy as the benevolent Mrs Dickson, Faith Omole is the talented singer/pianist Mayme forced to depend on men’s desires, and Claudia Jolly shows how even the well-meaning Mrs Van Buren exploits Esther’s position through her own privilege. Alex Waldmann impresses as the courteous Mr Marks full of restrained passion, while Kadiff Kirwan shows how George’s natural masculine exuberance is corrupted by a culture that does not give him and his kind the basic respect that everyone deserves.
