Review by Simon Jenner, April 17th 2025
“I will separate the Inseparables” threatens their teacher, when two girls aged nine form a lifelong bond. What’s the nature of that bond, who’s the more loving one, what indeed is love? Simone de Beauvoir’s eponymous novel, written in1954 but supressed till 2020 – partly at de Beauvoir’s partner Sartre’s behest – is still fresh. And in a sense raw. Is it dramatic? Working from Lauren Elkin’s translation, Grace Joy Howarth’s adaptation of The Inseparables premieres at the Finborough, directed by Anastasia Bunce, till May 10th.
Howarth’s known for Blood On Your Hands, a bleak play set in an abattoir encircled by animal rights activists, premiered at Southwark Playhouse last year. If The Inseparables was designed to show Howarth’s capacity to write its opposite, it couldn’t be better chosen. Over two hours (with interval) a slight, even melodramatic storyline breathes through excellent performances and stunning production values.
Ayesha Ostler Photo Credit:-A.J. Halsey and Melanie Silva
It begins in 1917 though ends 12 years later. Sylvie (Ayesha Ostler) prays for a miracle: she gets three: her father indeed returns from the front, a new school starts in September, and wholly unexpectedly Andrée (Lara Manela) bursts into her life. Manela whirls around the stage, mimicking the violin she plays in air, and Daniela Poch’s movement direction is fully rewarded in Manela’s spellbinding poise and energy. She’s a comet round the earthbound Sylvie, who looks on transfixed on occasion. Manela’s excitable Andrée is also most prone to change hairstyles, in her shapeshifting talents that extend to reading erotic Horace and needlework when not waving her violin around her considerable musical talents. There’s a feverish halo too in Manela’s performance, something burning just too brightly.
It’s that brilliance that contrasts with Ostler’s more severe, but also wiser intellectual Sylvie; someone who admires, adores, writing letters Andrée absorbs and equivocates over.
Manela’s a foil to Ostler’s less overtly demanding but more difficult role. Ostler’s moments come in solo narratives and interacting with several cast-members at once. Sylvie’s stoical love for Andrée quietly registers her friend’s attraction to men, and backgrounds whatever feeling she has. The possible sexual relationship isn’t hinted. The intensity of Sylvie’s love (neatly choreographed) has her fall down dead beside an imagined dead Andrée. It’s comic and telling.
It’s not simply a physical versus intellectual friendship. Andrée is quick to catch up, indeed is easily clever enough to get to the Sorbonne alongside Sylvie. Unlike Sylvie though – who’s freed by her father’s ruin to pursue a career – Caroline Trowbridge’s excellently manipulative Madame Gallard has other plans for her daughter: an arranged marriage. Marrying for love indeed is frowned on; there’s a poignant discovery about Madame Gallard’s past too. She’s already crushed a fifteen-year-old romance between Andrée and a rich young Argentinian.
Alexandre Costet-Barmada and Lara Manela. Photo Credit:-A.J. Halsey and Melanie Silva
Initially hostile to Sylvie, Gallard begins to see her as better companion than the men Andrée attracts. There’s a touch of Brideshead Revisited about the Catholic matriarch here, a similar tenor. Trowbridge is excellent: forbidding, glacially warm, a kind of anti-Laclos character. Similarly as Teacher and Pascal’s more working-class, equally shrewd mother Madame Blondel (fleetingly at the end) Trowbridge signals a gamut of checks to independence.
Madame Gallard has an unlikely ally too. Briefly a repressive Priest, Alexandre Costet-Barmada’s Pascal, initially Sylvie’s friend but not lover (also a slightly oafish party-popping ‘handsome man’) is a proto-existential, Catholic intellectual who hesitates commitment when he and Andrée are immediately attracted.
Desperate to elicit a declaration, Andrée spins more peregrine than ever out of Sylvie’s orbit: but unlike Sylvie is somehow snared by her faith, one abandoned by Sylvie. Pascal too in Costet-Barmada’s performance, seems close to his Priest in counselling submission and waiting.
Though Madame Gallard pulls the levers, you can’t help feeling Andrée’s strings are being played by another bow-hand than hers. Already capable of plunging an axe just so far into her foot, you wonder what else Andrée’s delirious sensibility can withstand.
Lara Manela, Ayesha Ostler Photo Credit:-A.J. Halsey and Melanie Silva
Lara Manela and Alexandre Costet-Barmada. Photo Credit:-Stuart Ray
Hazel Poole Zane’s set is a three-sided traditional interior, white and pale green, with several antique movables, including an elaborately-carved cabinet with a flipped lid. There’s a singular moment with red roses. and lit by Abraham Walkling-Lea in epiphanic moments, ones of Tenebrae or blazing light it’s deceptively tranquil too. It’s centred by Jessica Brauner’s video design: a many-splendoured window changing images from ornate church stained-glass through writing samples and greenery in one of the most exquisite of its kind I remember.
Flick Isaac Chilton’s sound of classical music pulsates throughout, almost without pause. Inevitably it evokes the Church Sumptuous in Allegri’s Misere, but is rightly mainly French: Ravel, in particular the Introduction and Allegro, Debussy (his Violin Sonata most apposite), Lili Boulanger’s violin Reverie (more would have been good, surely the heart of Andrée) and a witty reference to marriage in Saint-Saens’ Wedding Cake Caprice, illness in Fauré’s Apres un reve and incongruously Elgar’s Chanson d’Amour, Purcell’s Dido’s Lament and (tactlessly?) ‘Touch her soft lips’ from Walton’s Henry V. Chilton’s choice of musical titles are subliminally knowing. Justin Stirewalt’s intimacy coordination is so light-touch it enacts the cast’s restraints and hesitations.
No obvious choice for adaptation, certainly not one in Howarth’s version to suggest more than what’s explicit in the novel, we’re left with a transfixingly beautiful production, with often superb acting, especially from Manela. Andrée’s original, Zaza, fell in love with De Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s future colleague Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The debate about de Beauvoir’s relationship with Zaza outlined in the notes is racier but is sexuality the point? Howarth’s adaptation teases and sensibly withholds such obvious epiphanies. Anyway it’s Easter. To say The Inseparables is up with Finborough’s most consummate productions recently says everything to those who know the theatre. Howarth looks at whatever truth De Beauvoir withheld and tells it slant. De Beauvoir though cherished friendship as one means to immortality, overcoming our radical separation. That might not be so sheerly theatrical, but it’s humanly compelling.
Presented by Conjureman Productions and Inseparable Productions in association with Neil McPherson for the Finborough Theatre
Stage Manager Kiara Atkinson, Production Manager
Production Photography
General Manager Jillian Feuerstein
Conjureman Productions and Inseparable Productions, Neil McPherson
Ayesha Ostler Photo Credit:-A.J. Halsey and Melanie Silva
