Mike Bartlett wrote Mrs Delgado during lockdown, after a period of struggling to put pen to paper, and it has the gleeful glow of someone returning to what they love. The story and characters tumble out fully formed. The jokes feel effortless, the passion instinctive. It’s a heartfelt rallying cry for the importance of community, performed in one of the micro-communities that Bartlett most cherishes: the theatre.
Ellen Robertson – who appeared in Bartlett’s 2018 Christmas play, Snowflake – has had to step into this one-woman play at the last minute and performs sitting at a stool with script in hand. As Robertson reads the play aloud, occasionally drinking from a mug decorated with unicorns, a subtle sense of magic emerges. It’s as if we’re all kids again, gathered at the library to listen to a story.
Robertson narrates as Helen, a young woman who becomes bizarrely fixated on her 80-something neighbour, Mrs Delgado, as lockdown takes its toll. It’s August 2020 but “Mrs D” (a nod to Woolf’s Dalloway?) is refusing to play by the rules. She’s inviting visitors inside, chatting to anyone who’ll listen and even hugging the Amazon delivery man. Mrs Delgado must be stopped. For her own good.
You can almost hear Bartlett chuckling as he brings Mrs Delgado into being. With just a few careful observations and, in Robertson, a very funny and charismatic actor, Mrs Delgado bursts off the page. She sunbathes on a table. She stares up at the ceiling for a full four minutes. She wears red flowing dresses, bakes frozen-pea fruitcakes and dances in the street.
Director Clare Lizzimore is careful not to overplay the script. As Helen’s eyes turn away from her closed world of Netflix, Tinder and Zoom, and turn towards the life that thrives just beyond her pulled-down blinds, Robertson brings an entire street to life. The conjuring of these characters never feels virtuosic. Instead, it feels effortless – a palpable demonstration of just how easy it is to create a community, given half a chance.
• At the Old Fire Station, Oxford, until 21 December. Livestreamed on 11 and 14 December.
