Shadow play from a dramatist of exceptional promise

13 November 2025, The Tablet

Katie Matsell and Ben Lamb in Ragdoll

ALEX BRENNER

The socialite turned socialist terrorist

Ragdoll
JERMYN STREET THEATRE, LONDON

We can all be embarrassed by old photographs; but for Patricia Hearst the disjunct with her younger image is extreme. In 1974, CCTV in a San Francisco bank caught her wielding a machine gun during a raid carried out by the Symbionese Liberation Army, an American leftist group that had kidnapped her two months earlier. As she was the heiress to the fortune of the Hearst media corporation, this switch from socialite to socialist terrorist became a textbook example of “Stockholm Syndrome”, in which captives bond with captors.

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