Modest, Kiln Theatre review ★★★★★

Elizabeth Thompson (later Lady Butler) was a Victorian painter who broke through the stereotype of the genteel depiction of flowers and fruits and dedicated her considerable talent to portraying vigorous scenes from British military campaigns, including the Crimean War.

The all-male Royal Academy reluctantly condescended to show her work, and she promptly acquired a dedicated following, but they refused her persistent attempts to become the first woman elected to the Academy. As the top dog academician in Modest snarls, ‘I am an artist; you are a woman.’

That in a nutshell is the central plot of Ellen Brammar’s play Modest. But at a time when women were beginning to agitate for equal rights, the play adds a subsidiary plot, centred on her sister, the poet and suffragette Alice Meynell (here an anachronistic trans activist), and her attempts to persuade the entirely self-centred Elizabeth to take on the wider struggle for the rights of women. Elizabeth steadfastly refuses, and this sub-plot gets nowhere.

A co-production by the Hull-based company Middle Child, which specialises in what it describes as ‘gig theatre’, and Milk Presents, whose mission is ‘to improve the lives of trans and queer people’, Modest riffs on Elizabeth’s story through a hybrid format combining theatre with music/cabaret/drag kings, its six-strong cast (all duly adding preferred pronouns to the cast list) taking on more than one role, except for Elizabeth (Emer Dineen, she/they), who is only ever Elizabeth.

Directed by Luke Skilbeck and Paul Smith, Modest’s mix of styles makes for a busy, lively show, but not a very good one. Rachel Barnes musical score offers a few unmemorable songs, the short drag-king dance numbers suffer from poor choreography, relying on much pelvic thrusting and crotch grabbing, and the dialogue, particularly the repetitive arguments between the sisters, feels a touch programmatic. By the third iteration of ‘you must carry all women with you’, ‘no, this is about glorious me’ it feels rather like padding.

On the plus side, Modest does offer a glimpse into one interesting episode in the history of art, and the consistent sidelining of women within it. However, despite the cast’s spirited performances, there is a whiff of am-dram about the whole enterprise.