Florence Margaret “Stevie” Smith (1902-1971) is now remembered almost solely for her poem Not Waving But Drowning, although she published nine volumes of verse (not counting collections) and three novels. These works blended fatalism with whimsy and consistently sang the praises of the English suburbs where she lived all her life, specifically in Palmers Green in north London. Hugh Whitemore’s 1977 play presents Stevie, the aunt with whom she lived and a third figure representing assorted peripheral men in her life, and uses narration to the audience as much as dialogue. Smith’s poems butterfly in and out of the script more often than they are formally demarcated for recital.
    
Zoë Wanamaker is a first-rate Stevie. She embraces the mild eccentricity (though what is eccentric about preferring an unexceptional life?), gives full though unostentatious weight to Smith’s musings upon death yet prefers the wry mordancy distilled into the likes of the two-line poem “This Englishwoman is so refined/She has no bosom and no behind.” Wanamaker’s interpretative gaze is keen enough to dispel any lurking old memories of Glenda Jackson, who created the role on stage and film (and is now MP for the constituency in which the Hampstead Theatre is situated).
    
In the end, though, the play comes over as comfortable, perhaps even complacent rather than either probing Stevie’s own life or (re)introducing us to a neglected literary figure. It can even feel like a decorous exaltation of our most undistinguished lifestyles, implicitly claiming that they are not just capable of yielding art but are themselves the very stuff of art. In terms of the play itself, this is giving something of a hostage to fortune: it is not always easy to see the innate difference in quality between Smith’s own verse and that of an old schoolmistress which she derides. Both Hampstead and Chichester, which premièred this production last spring, have admirable current reputations for alternating solid programming with more adventurous and challenging work; Stevie has the illusion of adventure close to home, of seeing familiar territory afresh, but really Whitemore’s play and Christopher Morahan’s sedate production are as reassuringly solid as a slice of Battenberg cake. It left me not raving but frowning.
  
Written for the Financial Times.