Samira Wiley Shines as a Lovelorn Seamstress in Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel

Intimate Apparel (Donmar Warehouse)

Verdict: Tailored to perfection

Rating:

Lynn Nottage’s play was inspired by a faded photograph of her great-grandmother, a seamstress who came from Barbados to New York, aged just 18. That she married her penpal — a labourer on the Panama Canal — is all Nottage knew of her.

Her play, set in Manhattan in 1905, reimagines her great grandma as plain, meek, unmarried Esther, 35. For 17 years she has been sewing undergarments for the wedding trousseaus of rich, white women and for her friend, Mayme, a vivacious, piano-playing black prostitute (Faith Omole), wishing they were for herself.

A compelling, quivering Samira Wiley (star of Netflix’s Orange Is The New Black) suggests a woman as delicate — yet as robust — as the lace she works with. Esther stitches her earnings into her bed quilt and dreams of one day opening her own beauty parlour.

Ingeniously set in various bedrooms, the focus of this intricately woven piece is tight, but its breadth wide, as Nottage expertly unpicks ideas about intimacy, class and race.

Racy lace: Esther (Samira Wiley) surveys Mrs Van Buren (Claudia Jolly) in her handiwork

Esther is not allowed through the front door of bored Mrs Van Buren’s home and yet she is welcomed into her boudoir — and her confidence.

She longs for love. But in the meantime she pours her thwarted sensuality into her corsets, her passion for sumptuous silks shared by gentle Romanian draper, Mr Marks (Alex Waldmann).

As they trace their fingers lingeringly over the fabrics, there is no doubt they are imagining it were the other’s flesh. They are clearly made for one another — but Marks, an Orthodox Jew, is engaged to a woman he has never met.

When illiterate Esther starts a correspondence with one of the construction workers in Panama, Mrs Van B answers the letters for her, often as Esther laces her basque.

Stitch in time: Esther (Samira Wiley, with Nicola Hughes), a poor seamstress, creates saucy smalls for wealthy white women in a beautifully woven period drama set in 1905 New York

Doing time: Wiley (foreground) as inmate Poussey Washington in Orange Is The New Black 

When Gorgeous George (Kadiff Kirwan) arrives in New York to marry her, he is a very different man from the sweet penpal. Think Cyrano. Esther’s dreams unravel.

An exceptional cast make these richly textured characters wholly believable. This is high couture drama, tailored to perfection in Lynette Linton’s seamless staging. Unmissable.

Until August 9 (donmarwarehouse.com)

GEORGINA BROWN