One is the loneliest number ... Lucy Briers in Some Kind of Bliss. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
The monologue is a tricky thing. There is something appealing in its simplicity, but it is also one of the hardest acts to pull off. The writing is inevitably foregrounded so any holes or weaknesses are glaringly apparent. For the actor charged with delivering these lines, it can be incredible exposing. There is nowhere to hide if the material is not up to scratch, no one else to cover for you if a line goes awry.
Samuel Adamson's Some Kind of Bliss, currently playing at the Trafalgar Studios in the West End, is a perfect illustration of these contradictions. Starring Lucy Briers as Rachel, a lifestyle journalist who embarks on an eventful walk from London Bridge to Greenwich, it seems overly keen to distract from the fact that it is, essentially, just one woman talking. Lucy Osborne's striking set, with its metal mesh floor lit from beneath, and Adamson's incident-stuffed plot, seem to fight against the play's rather basic central conceit: Rachel's realisation that she is not very happy in her marriage and in her life in general.
It's not the only solo show in London at the moment: the Arcola itself has two. In the smaller studio, they're staging Declan Feenan's Limbo, about a terminally passive 17-year-old girl's relationship with a much older man. Upstairs they have Michael Pennington's engaging account of the life of Shakespeare, Sweet William, though this doesn't quite count, being more of a memoir or verbal essay than anything else. And at Battersea's Theatre 503 there is Mark O'Rowe's bleak and bludgeoning Crestfall. This actually features three characters played by three different actors, but they never interact and the play takes the form of a series of monologues. Even with the benefit of some superb performances and full-on syntactical acrobatics from O'Rowe, there is something unavoidably static about the show - about all these shows, in fact.
It's not that a minimal approach is never appropriate on stage. Last year's production of Beckett's Eh Joe had Michael Gambon wordlessly reacting to a recording of a female voice, which made for a fascinating theatrical experience. But, I suspect, in this case brevity played a key role; that and the fact that Gambon has a superbly watchable face.
More often than not, the solo show is chosen, especially by fringe companies, because it is cheap to stage and easy to squeeze into small spaces. In these instances, I am often reminded of Annie Griffin's excellent Edinburgh-set film Festival and of Lyndsey Marshall's wide-eyed fringe virgin, putting on her earnest account of the life of Dorothy Wordsworth.
Some productions, of course, escape these cliches. But I'm left with the nagging feeling that there is something a bit anti-theatre about the majority of one-person shows; that little would be lost if they were performed on the radio instead. Perhaps I just crave more than they're able to give.
