REVIEW: ANNIE WOBBLER (REVISITED) By Arnold Wesker at Finborough Theatre 2 to 26 September 2026
‘Nicola McAuliffe gives a tour-de-force masterclass’ ★★★★★
Hard to imagine how Annie Wobbler could be better revisited than in the Finborough’s present production, fresh from a triumphant run in Edinburgh in August. Nicola McAuliffe, who first performed the play back in 1983 and for whom it was written by Arnold Wesker, gives a tour-de-force masterclass in bringing three women at different life stages into existence.
It’s a performance big enough to entrance a 1,000-seat auditorium, but part of its sheer joy comes from being able to see from a few feet away in the Finborough’s intimate space a top-class actor seeming effortlessly to infuse her characters with joy, pain, hope and really quite alarming rage on the turn of a phrase, the flicker of a thought on McAuliffe’s ever-expressive face. The rest of the production’s pitch perfect too – a set populated by mannequins, wigs, bric-a-brac suggesting its characters ordered and disordered lives.
The show starts with Anna, a young woman just out of university, the first of her generation and female to boot, beginning, with optimism and trepidation, to explore the possibilities life is offering her. A boyfriend from a higher social class and better university who patronises her dreadfully but seems to offer opportunity (and voiceovers from Alex Jennings to represent smug self-satisfaction never hurt any show). There is perhaps a slight adjustment required for the audience as McAuliffe arrives (it takes a moment or two to visually resolve whether this is a young woman or an older one clinging to her youth) but the mixture of yearning and underlying awareness that life has not often been unmixedly good for women of Anna’s class is beautifully written, perfectly mined for its pathos and wit.
Odder is the middle segment, in which Annabelle, a writer, is seen in two incarnations, perhaps bipolar personalities – a drifty, dreamy Irish lady (who nonetheless knows the value of a million dollar contract), and a fierce, combative, energetic Scots author who has no truck with idiots and provides some genuinely terrifying moments of anger. The shift from Anna to Annabelle, including near invisible costume change, is another perfectly achieved theatrical effect – this is a show with a great script, a superb performance, and all the technical stuff so ideal it almost goes unnoticed.
Annie Wobbler herself fills the last part of the play – an older woman, unkempt, in need of a bath, who cleans where she can to scrape a living and is found with her trolley in Waterloo Station, musing on her life and where it went until the station closes. It should be and is heartrendingly sad – this is a woman who thinks they didn’t quite put her together right and for whom opportunity has never knocked – but Annie’s spirit and joy in small things makes hers a life less ordinary, too.
It’s one of the things with theatre, unlike film or TV, that performances live only in the mind. Seeing Nicola McAuliffe, just gone 70, inhabiting the characters she created when she was under 30 merely makes me wish I’d seen them back in 1983 as well. Sheer joy.
Box Office: https://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/productions/annie-wobbler-revisited
Production Images - Credit: Ella Carmen Dale
Reviewer David Weir is the author of The Westminster Mysteries novel series, including The Honourable Member for Murder. Plays include Confessional (Oran Mor, Glasgow), Murdering the Truth (Greenwich Theatre, London) and Better Together (Jack Studio, Brockley, London).
