Alma Mater review – skeletons escape closets in campus

Almeida theatre, London
Kendall Feaver’s play dissects white privilege and a university’s #MeToo moment that begins when a student speaks out after being sexually assaulted

“A terrible thing happened in this building,” says Nikki, an undergraduate at a residential college in a venerable and fictitious British university. “And I am going to do something about it.” In Alma Mater, Kendall Feaver’s dissection of one institution’s #MeToo moment, Nikki encourages Paige, who was recently raped by a fellow student, to go public about her ordeal. Soon, hundreds of women are sharing their experiences of what Nikki is quick to brand the university’s “rape culture”.

Too quick? Jo, the first female master of the college, believes so. In the 1980s, she was a firebrand herself, and part of the first female intake at the historically all-male establishment. Now she has the college’s reputation to defend, and seems more concerned about that than her students. Stepping into that role at short notice after Lia Williams bowed out for health reasons, Justine Mitchell shows how a lifetime of fighting to be heard may have cost Jo her empathy. Liv Hill deftly captures the dilemma of Paige, who is emboldened to fight but wary of being defined by trauma. The star of the evening is the electrifying Phoebe Campbell, who keeps Nikki’s humanity and fallibility shimmering behind the character’s single-mindedness.