There are a thousand stories that can be told of the French Revolution, but one tale that is largely forgotten is that of Théroigne de Méricourt, an orator and person of some note in the National Assembly meetings during the thrust of the revolution.
The Miles Sisters have brought her life to the stage by having her recount it from her room in La Salpêtrière Hospital, where she spent the final years of her life. Cara Johnston performs her play, with de Méricourt cast as a gleefully wild-eyed storyteller, taking time away from an opera she is scribbling on countless sheafs of torn and messy paper. The walls of her chamber are festooned with various drapes, each painted with a background that serves to tell part of her tale.
As she steps the audience through the days of her youth and the meandering and serpentine routes through which she moved from the backwaters to the heart of Paris, there’s a surprising modernity to her tale, a harking to the story of every fame-struck teenager who ever went to Hollywood and found pain and betrayal instead of glittering lights. Only this lady is certainly not for turning. There’s a strength to the story, told with only the faintest glimmers of regret.
Johnston carries the story with a kindness and refusal to see this as a victim’s story, and that’s a bold and triumphant choice. It does, however, remove any chance the audience has to really genuinely feel sorrow for her, as events are swept through so fast and de Méricourt so quick to bounce back from failure that it’s only in the final moments that there’s a measure of time for breath. But that aside, it’s a rich and perhaps well deserved homage to an unfairly forgotten woman of history, and a warning that perhaps little has changed.