Ragdoll: a ‘riveting’ dilemma play

In February 1974, Patty Hearst, the 19-year-old granddaughter of the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, was abducted in California by a band of left-wing guerrillas calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army, said Clive Davis in The Times. They demanded huge ransoms – but also released recordings of Hearst saying that she’d joined their cause. She was then spotted taking part in a bank robbery, leading to her arrest in September 1975.

Her case caused a sensation, and posed a question that divided America: had she actually become a terrorist, or had she (as she testified in court) been raped and coerced by her captors? These events, and this question, provide the inspiration for this sharp and intriguing new play by English playwright Katherine Moar.

It’s a “riveting” memory play that traces the fallout from the case through a fictional meeting decades later between Patty Hearst, known here as Holly (Abigail Cruttenden), and Robert (Nathaniel Parker), the odious lawyer who lost her case, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. Having prospered in the intervening years, he is now facing sexual misconduct allegations in the #MeToo era that could ruin him, and hopes Holly – back in high society – will speak up for him. The irony of this reversal is not lost on her: he had not sympathised with her back then, and her sexual assault allegations were not believed. “How things change,” she says. “Forty years ago, it was sex. Now it’s rape.” The play “does not quite know how to finish” but the dialogue is “so deft and sparkling, you could listen on and on”.

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I would have liked Moar to have spent more time examining why Holly joined her captors, said Aleks Sierz on The Arts Desk. We hear Robert’s dismissive “Velcro theory” – she was just a privileged young woman who got stuck to the first ideology she ran into – yet other ones are “barely hinted at”. Still, the play is very good at showing how the pair’s younger selves (who appear in flashback, played by different actors) “are strangers to their older sense of themselves”. Briskly directed, and written with “great theatrical confidence”, it adds up to a “compelling” exploration of the legacy of a grim decade.
Jermyn Street Theatre, London SW1. Until 15 November.