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Nights in the Gardens of Spain and Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet review – pain and passion in Bennett duo

The first monologue in this double-bill offers up a slice of suburban gothic: a middle-aged wife is tethered to a dog leash by her husband and made to crawl on all-fours with a bag over her head as the neighbours watch. This image is one among many recurring symbols and stories of oppressed womanhood that range across these Alan Bennett dramas.

Tamsin Greig and Maxine Peake reprise the roles they played in the recent BBC TV adaptation and it is clear that both their characters are long-suffering, gravely put-upon by the cruel or ungrateful men in their lives. There are references to balls and chains, to burdensome dependency and to the prison of married life, alongside domestic violence, murder and kinky sex.

The monologues, the last in the Talking Heads series at the Bridge theatre, are among the most X-rated of the eight but also the most soul-searching and self-aware. These women are reaching into themselves, talking restlessly about all that the men in their lives have taken from them and what, if anything, they can salvage.

Greig’s Rosemary, in Nights in the Gardens of Spain, is not one of Bennett’s magnificently obdurate women. She is a timid wife, carrying her load obligingly, though something shifts inside when she befriends Fran, a neighbour who shoots her husband dead after enduring years of sexual torture at his hands. Sensitively directed by Marianne Elliott, the monologue details the domestic violence that was glanced at in The Outside Dog. Here, we are told of the old fractures on Fran’s body, alongside cigarette burns and loose teeth.

It is bleak not only for its modern-day resonance to campaigns such as Sally Challen’s but in its picture of married life as a whole. A policeman, looking for a motive at the murder scene in Fran’s house, comments wryly: “It’s marriage. Stresses and strains of,” while a neighbour complains: “Husbands, Rosemary, who needs them?”

Fran’s abuse informs Rosemary of the coercion in her own marriage but that self-knowledge is made more painful by her inability to act on it and Greig exudes a tragic sense of her own unimportance; she knows she won’t leave her husband and we leave her stranded in silent self-recrimination.

Maxine Peake’s Miss Fozzard is a very different kind of woman. Caring for an ungrateful brother, she is lonely, housebound and full of yearning. Unlike Rosemary, she doesn’t resign herself to her lot but strikes out for freedom, first in returning to her job and then developing an unconventional – and racy – relationship with her chiropodist.

Shoes are placed on either side of the stage in a small, non-naturalistic nod to the foot fetishism in this piece, which is beautifully directed by Sarah Frankcom, and Peake’s performance is a flamboyant one, full of lip-smacking relish and eyebrow-raised archness, in which she lands every laugh.

In both monologues, there is the prospect of joy and release through unconventional passion. The friendship between Rosemary and Fran in Nights in the Gardens of Spain is its own love story; Fran’s imprisonment offers Rosemary a fleeting freedom, before it is taken away.

Related: Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads review – still a masterclass in storytelling

But Miss Fozzard clutches on to her taste of liberation, even when her brother begins to encroach on it again, by entering into a transactional exchange with her chiropodist (she serves his foot fetish, he pays her for it). “I suppose there’s a word for what I’m doing,” she says, and sashays off the stage into her new life.

Just as Irene finds her happiness in prison in Lady of Letters, Miss Fozzard shows that female liberation can be found in the most unexpected of places and ways. Miss Fozzard is not quite Ibsen’s Nora, shutting the door on all her domestic burden, but she may be the closest thing in Bennett’s world.