The Inseparables, Finborough Theatre review - uneven portrait of a close female friendship

The Finborough has once again performed the miracle of creating a whole world in its intimate space: this time, inter-war France, where two young girls meet and form a strong attachment. The semi-autobiographical story comes from a 1954 Simone de Beauvoir novel, Les inséparables, never published in her lifetime. Some apparently considered it too intimate, and Jean-Paul Sartre disapproved of it.

Or maybe the great existentialist had spotted that the story is a trifle thin. Two bourgeois girls move though puberty to Paris, where one goes to university and the other meets a handsome intellectual (based on the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty). Together the women share opinions and strike attitudes that could be called ur-feminist and are certainly independent-minded; then their relationship, whatever its status, is rudely cut short. 

The swottier of the two, Sylvie Lapage (Ayesha Ostler), is assumed to be de Beauvoir; Sylvie’s artistic best friend Andrée Gallard (Lara Manela), a portrait of de Beauvoir’s bosom buddy Elisabeth Lacoin, aka Zaza. The girls spend their summers in the Gallards’ summer home, where Andrée’s strict, pious mother (Caroline Trowbridge, pictured below, left, with Lara Manela, excellent here and in all the smaller female roles) often deploys her as a servant, to Sylvie’s disgust. A good marriage is to be Andrée’s lot, and definitely not to her childhood chum Bernard (Alexandre Costet-Barmada, pictured bottom, with Manela, ably multi-tasking in all the minor male parts), whose lineage is richer but, hélas, both Argentinian and Jewish.

Manela gives a lovely, fresh performance as Andrée, who expresses herself mainly via her (simulated) violin-playing and dancing. She is a creature moved by passions, floating and cartwheeling around the small stage with huge skill, at one point almost twirling herself into its sidewalls. When she first appears, as a nine-year-old in a smart red coat over a pink ruffled dress, she is an elfin creature, light as air. As she matures, her love of life is just as buoyant, though increasingly unmoored. Unlike Sylvie, she is not a devout atheist and clings, increasingly afraid, to her faith, self-administering the sacrament. A childhood accident in which she was badly burned has left more than physical scars. 

Manela is French, as is Costet-Barmada (both trained at LAMDA). In one scene, when Costet-Barmada reappears as intellectual, devout Pascal, they chat away in their native tongue. Their authenticity is a useful addition. But it also makes Sylvie an outlier, a four-square English character in both accent and manner who would be at home as a senior prefect in a home counties boarding school. Was this director Anastasia Bunce’s intention, to underline the gap between the girls? Ostler’s delivery is impeccable, accentuating Sylvie’s decidedly rational approach to life; but she is hard to place as a sophisticated French renegade. When she realises the depth of her affection for Andrée, there is no erotic charge to the moment. It’s a briskly delivered statement, not a painful confession. And Andrée’s core passion is always directed to the men in her life.

What the girls go on to discuss as they grow up does shine a light on the restrictive practices of the 19th century bourgeoisie. As females, they are not expected to attend university and must form unions, as Andrée’s sister Malou does, with the candidates their parents approve of. Andrée is a romantic who believes in love at first sight, but for her mother it’s love at first vow: you marry a rich man and then learn to love. Isn’t this just a form of prostitution, the girls ask themselves?

There’s a latent feminism in much of this, though it’s not exactly incendiary stuff. For its time, perhaps, the girls’ close relationship was risqué as a literary topic, but now its novelty is buried in period trappings. Does de Beauvoir’s novel, finally published in 2020 and adapted here by Grace Joy Howarth, skirt this issue too? 

Go along for Manela and the play’s stagecraft, which is impressive. The scenery is minimal, to maximum benefit. A lace-curtained window becomes a site for artful little video projections — providing among other things, the date, the setting of the scene (Andrée goes swimming in one), even incidental props such as the Gallards’ family portraits. A wooden bench with a tilting back becomes a seat in a horse-drawn carriage, a pew. The only significant piece of furniture is a chaise longue. Underlining the Frenchness of the scenario are refreshing bursts of Fauré chamber music (though his Requiem gives way to Tallis’s Spem in alium in one of the final scenes). 

This is a pleasant, often charming and well performed way to spend two hours, though not a wildly illuminating one.

The Inseparables at the Finborough Theatre until 10 May

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