Linda, Royal Court, London, review: Takedown of the beauty industry is only skin deep

Noma Dumezweni breathes genuine, generous life into an slighty clunky, over-calculated piece

Noma Dumezweni as Linda and Imogen Byron as Bridget (Johan Persson)

If there were an Olivier Award for courage and chutzpah in the line of duty then it’s fair to say that Noma Dumezweni would be a shoo-in for this year’s gong. Linda, the leading character in Penelope Skinner’s forceful new play about women and the problems that stem from ageist prejudice, is a massive role. Dumezweni had only 10 days to rehearse it since she intrepidly stepped up to the mark to replace Kim Cattrall, who had to withdraw from Michael Longhurst’s production on the advice of her doctors.

Dumezweni may occasionally have to consult the script, but she inhabits the part with a full-blooded authenticity, capturing with wry, long-suffering humour and impassioned, no-holds-barred empathy both what is attractive and admirable about the protagonist and what’s deluded, flawed and primed for toppling.

Linda is the 55-year-old senior brand manager for Swan Beauty Corporation. We see her at the start delivering a presentation about a product for the over-fifties designed give back self-esteem to women who are traditionally made to feel invisible by an industry that uses 30-year-old models even when flogging anti-ageing cream to them. Linda, who doesn’t let anyone forget that she won an award a decade back, feels that she’s the spearhead of a moral as well as marketing campaign whose slogan is “I’m changing the world, one girl at a time”.

But the woes of this woman who thinks she has it all (she certainly has to do it all), with her faithful, supportive husband and her two lovely daughters, begin when market research reveals that girls as young as 16 are having botox injections and that the money is that end of the spectrum. All gushing, little-girl admiration and transparent treachery, Amy Beth Hayes’s unsettling 25-year-old Amy starts to take over the operation.

On the home front, funny, painful scenes indicate that there is a terrible clash of perceptions. Linda imagines that she is being an exemplary role model to her daughters. In fact, they feel resentful and hurt that she only wants them to live up to her self-deceiving expectations. As the victim of a horrible revenge porn assault from an ex-boyfriend, Karla Crome’s excellently agitated and cynical Alice, has taken up permanent refuge in a skunk onesie that she imagines gives her the invisibility dreaded by her mother.

Skinner is very good at excruciating situations – the husband’s spiel of unalloyed self-pity when caught with a younger model; Linda’s tragicomically abandoned speech to her board about double standards in the wake of this traumatic discovery. But to my taste there is something too pat in the way the play engineers what becomes a living nightmare for the protagonist, climaxing in stormy Lear-like bouts of stricken, belated self-discovery. But Dumezweni breathes genuine, generous life into an slighty clunky, over-calculated piece.

To 9 January (020 7565 5000)