Perched on a stool, with a microphone and a glass of water from which she sips just twice, Kate O’Flynn gives a gripping, mercurial performance in this monologue that condenses a woman’s life into 40 hectic minutes.
The tumbling babble of Alistair McDowall’s script evokes Joyce’s Ulysses and Beckett’s Not I, though the content is rather more humdrum. O’Flynn and director Vicky Featherstone cleverly surf the formal and stylistic flourishes, but the show has more artifice than substance. It’s most successful in the first third.
Jumbled feelings, sounds and associations evoke the experience of babyhood. The confusions of childhood give way to the swagger of teenage years, undercut by agonised uncertainty. The story progresses in an orderly, tick-box fashion through adolescent fumbles to university flings to marriage, bereavement, motherhood, grandmotherhood and — spoiler alert! — death.
O’Flynn has an uncanny knack of lulling an audience into empathy and laughter, then bringing us up short with rage or pain. The way she and Featherstone give shape and rhythm to the Scrabble-bag scatter of words in the script is quite something.
Often I doubt whether very short shows are worth the effort of a theatre visit. This one is. With a lesser actor it might not be.
Until 15 Feb (020 7565 5000, royalcourttheatre.com)
