If you don't like stories with less than squeaky-clean protagonists, Theatre isn't for you. But if you don't mind sinking deep into the psyche of someone with a major manipulative streak who crosses a fair few lines of decorum, then you're in for a treat.

Theatre is one of those character-driven books wherein describing the plot vastly undermines the brilliance of the material by virtue of sounding incredibly straightforward: a wildly successful, aging actress in a loveless marriage goes through what could be described as a mid-life crisis.

Yes, that is (more or less) the plot, but that's not really what Theatre is about. It's a brilliant character study of Julia and how she lives her life as if in a play, taking the adage: 'all the world's a stage' to the extreme. She experiences her life as a series of scenes in which she is both star and director, acting in such a way as to 'drive' a given scene.

This is by no means an unconscious lifestyle choice either. Julia is well aware how to get the other 'actors' to play the 'scene' out as she wishes by choosing particular 'costumes', giving certain inflections and gestures.

And because she's such a great actress it works. Everyone, from the general public to her confidants are none the wiser that they're participants in her performance. The few times anyone gets close to sniffing her out, she is able to convince them that she's being perfectly sincere. Well...all but one.

Spoiler

Her son, Roger, confronts her about her lack of sincerity as she moves through the world, and in one of the most poignant quotes from the book says: "When I’ve seen you go into an empty room I’ve sometimes wanted to open the door suddenly, but I’ve been afraid to in case I found nobody there."

Julia is utterly unflapped by this insight and indeed, doubles down on her own decision to live as she always has: as an amalgamation of all the rolls she's ever played and playing to her immediate 'audience'.

Her approach to life isn't completely without setbacks, however; when she attempts to act out her true emotions on stage, her acting is heavily criticized as being bad, and she swears to herself never to use a real emotion in her craft again--an interesting callback to Dorian Gray's Sybil Vane who's art also fails when the emotion she tries to convey through acting is real.

This creates a delicious discussion about art and whether indeed it imitates life, or rather, a more idealized version of it. That that emotion in both cases is love isn't insignificant either, and raises s several questions: is real love as beautiful as we've romanticized it to be? Does this apply to other emotions too? What do we really mean when we compliment a actor on a 'great' performance?

And that's only one element of what makes this such an intriguing read: Maugham's subversion of performative gender is equally worthy of discussion, particularly given the time in which it was published and the fact that a man was so successfully able to write a genuine, female heroine.

Julia is not a woman oppressed by the expectations of her gender. Using her knowledge of what is expected of a woman, she weaponizes her femininity to manipulate the men in her life. She cries because she knows they are socially obligated to take pity on her, she uses politeness in complex 3- dimensional chess matches to garner sympathy and ultimately punish those she feels have slighted her. In other words: she operates within the framework of her society to do exactly as she pleases. And love her or hate her for the things that she does with her freedom, but there's something admirable in that.

The thing that really puts Theatre over the edge for me in terms of how much I enjoyed it was how little of Maugham one feels in the text. For every page of this novel I was fully submerged in Julia's world, in her head, and never once did I sense Maugham peeking around the corners of sentences with a wink and a nod to his own authorial intentions.

Highly, highly recommend to anyone who enjoyed The Picture of Dorian Gray in particular, but in general for anyone who enjoys deep-diving into someone else's mind, though they do so at their peril...