My heart rarely skips a beat at the prospect of a one-person play. But since Geraldine Aron's subject is a desperate divorcee's adjustment to solitude, the form ideally fits the content. And Dawn French colonises the stage so naturally and is such funny company that I found myself highly entertained by a show which is about loneliness.
French's Angela is a lapsed Catholic whose first reaction to her mid-life abandonment by her Jewish husband is one of joy. But gradually reality hits home. Vengeful loathing of her husband's sausage-lipped young lover is accompanied by awful meetings with a misogynist divorce lawyer and unfulfilling dates with the lonelyhearts brigade. Like many divorcees, Aron's Angela clings to the hope that even a rocky marriage can be restored; but, as her husband trades in one bimbo for another, she is forced to confront the vanity of her dreams.
In a casual aside, Angela remarks that "most women, one way and another, end up alone". But the show's charm lies in the fact that both Aron and French push the absurdity of the situation as much as its pathos. Angela is a raging hypochondriac who imagines she has bowel cancer when she has overdosed on beetroot. Even her desperate attempts to find an erotic undertow in late-night counselling chats are as funny as they are sad. Admittedly, you wonder at Angela's absence of friends and the limitless nature of her humiliations. What Aron understands, however, is the way the cards are stacked against the middle-aged singleton.
She is also fortunate in having Dawn French as her interpreter. There is a roly-poly geniality about French that enables her to treat life's disasters as if they were farce. As she evokes the dwarfishness of her first post-marital date or the embarrassments of a sex shop where the assistant loudly itemises one's purchases, she makes you laugh at Angela's dilemmas. But as she talks on the phone to her unsympathetic mum or gruffly unresponsive husband, she also lets you see that enforced independence is no joke.
In the end the play seems a bit too much of an anthology of misfortunes. But Garry Hynes's production, with its periodic firework eruptions marking the anniversary of Angela's abandonment, is full of visual interest. And there is the profound pleasure of watching French, who peoples the stage with absent enemies, whether it be her facially lop-sided lawyer or her husband's young lovers. Mixing vaudevillian solo-turn and vicarious soul-baring, she offers an enjoyable evening of stand-up tragedy.
· Until May 10. Box office: 020-7494 5070.
