The campaigning activist for women’s rights Simone de Beauvoir, born in 1908, has an important place in 20th-century political history.
Among the factors she has cited as shaping her development is her early friendship with Elisabeth Lacoin. This friendship became the basis of her 1954 novel Les Inséparables, which was finally published in 2020. It also became the basis of Grace Joy Howarth’s play The Inseparables, which lets us glimpse the pair aged nine when they meet, aged 13 and finally aged twenty-two.
As young girls in France, Sylvie (Ayesha Ostler) and Andreé (Lara Manela), the characters based on Simone and Elisabeth, are excited by their mutual interest in books and ideas. Sylvie, sometimes speaking directly to the audience, tells us that “Andreé made me laugh.”
Both are school achievers and spend time reading their parents’ books, even though that occasionally gets them in trouble for reading supposedly inappropriate literature. They take a serious approach to their development. Sylvie says it includes the French Revolution and political ideas.
At times, adults played by Caroline Trowbridge and Alexandre Costet-Barnada enter the scenes to discourage them or point them in more conventional directions expected for women of the time. The priest pesters them about their confession. The issue of taking communion crops up, revealing a difference between Andreé’s religious feelings and Sylvie’s scepticism of religion.
Reaching marriageable age, the girls are expected to look for marriage partners. Andreé falls for Sylvie’s friend Pascal, who, though interested in marrying her, thinks he has to wait a few years. As a result, her mother ships her off to Cambridge to keep her away from temptation.
The show very gently indicates some potential issues around the oppression of women, but never explores them or gives us any reason to care about them. There is no dramatic tension, and even Sylvie’s description of Andreé’s death seems sudden and emotionally lacking in any feeling.
The characters are likeable, but the dialogue is never particularly memorable or leads to any insights into character or situation. Apart from the women sharing interests and an excitement about life, which we can guess would have built their confidence and self-esteem, we don’t really learn how they may have shaped each other’s lives.