It's almost 100 years since Sophie Treadwell's expressionist play hit the stage, following the real-life events she witnessed as a journalist (though never wrote them up for a newspaper). Instead, she turned the life and death of Ruth Snyder into an explosive drama, an exploration of the human condition and how one woman was tormented by modern life into insanity and murder. In fact, when we first meet the unnamed Young Woman, she is already clearly fragile, struggling to cope with the crowds on the underground. When she arrives – late again – at the office she is just as clearly the outsider in her ill-fitting blue tea dress among the angular, sharp-suited workers all glib business, malicious gossip and staccato movements (fantastic work from Movement Director Sarah Fahie). Most of the gossip is indeed about her and the interest expressed in her by her boss. It's an interest much encouraged by her Irish mother (an excellent Buffy Davis) despite the Young Woman'
Recently, we had the chance to talk with Rosie Sheehy about taking on the role of Helen Jones, or “The Young Woman,” in Machinal. We discussed what compelled her to join this production, what it is like being a part of a work based on the real life of a woman and what she hopes audiences take away from the piece.