Machinal

‘Astonishing… a sort of infernal anxiety machine, percussive and remorseless, each hallucinatory scene immaculately crafted with its own distinct mood… the story feels sacred, mythological, foundational – a tale of one woman standing up to the system turned into a pulverising rapture’

‘A mind-bending, inexorable helter skelter into hell, surreal as a nightmare yet terrifyingly real’

‘Gripping… doesn’t loosen its hold on the senses until its shattering climax’

‘Stingingly fresh and provocative’

’[A work of] rare and disturbing beauty’

‘Gaspingly intense… Machinal remains pretty extraordinary stuff… [Treadwell’s] spare, percussive language frequently feels like it could have been written yesterday’

‘A dazzling piece of work… Machinal, written in 1928, has lost none of its cold fury, its expressionistic power to depict a woman trapped by a society that expects her to marry and conform. It is astonishingly modern’

‘An unforgettable portrait of a particular woman and of America itself as a hellishly dehumanised assembly line’

‘Feels strikingly modern: its sharp, splintered depiction of a young woman breaking apart in a dehumanising, mechanised world could have been written yesterday… an eloquent and groundbreaking play’

‘Machinal was decades ahead of its time and still feels astonishingly, and depressingly, pertinent’

‘Captivating, intense and resonant… a fascinating piece, a formally bold and explicitly feminist study of an ordinary woman who snaps under societal pressure… demonstrates Treadwell’s adventurousness as a playwright’

‘A remarkably dark portrait of mental torment [with] striking moments of dark comedy… Machinal has lost none of its potency’

Sophie Treadwell was born in California in 1885. She went to High School in San Francisco and then to the University of California, from which she graduated in 1906 and became a reporter on the San Francisco Bulletin. The highlights of her career as a journalist included an investigative series on homeless women, an exclusive interview with Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, and a spell in Europe as one of the first women foreign correspondents covering the 1914-18 War. She wrote four novels and more than thirty plays, including O Nightingale (1922), Gringo (1922), Machinal (1928), Ladies Leave (1929), Lusita (1931), Plumes in the Dust (1936), For Saxophone (1939-41) and Hope for a Harvest (1941). She died in 1970.