‘I’m starting to get hysterical,” says Rosalie Minnitt’s Clementine, bearing down on her show’s denouement. “I mustn’t let my womb get the better of me.” Reader, that battle has already been lost. Despite – or perhaps because of – its vexed etymology, “hysterical” is the only word to describe this fringe hit, which sets period-drama femininity spinning like a whirligig through time, and through a daft adventure in singledom, matchmaking, and self-discovery. Minnitt hurls herself into the character, and in a late-night slot in London’s Soho, she whips her audience into the kind of giddiness from which an Austen heroine would need a month’s bracing sea air to recover.
There’s a neat trick at the show’s heart. On the one hand it maxes out on frilly-bonneted womanhood – kept playfully date-nonspecific by Minnitt, whose world bounces from the Regency era to the early 1900s and back again. On the other, it couldn’t be more of the moment, mashing up 2023 life with the fiction of Clementine’s frantic search for a husband as her 27th birthday – fatal deadline! – looms. So the joke is not only about the swooning, the scheming and the circumscribed horizons of a certain class of Georgian/Victorian/Edwardian woman, her marital and childbearing status her only lifeline. It also teases that we’ve moved on from that sense and sensibility less than we might think.
Not that Minnitt’s show wastes time pontificating. It’s all played on the neurotic front foot, as Clementine tries to bag a beau before her sentence to spinsterdom is declared. Anachronisms (Reddit threads; chemtrails; multiverses) zip around amid pitch-perfect period parodies, such as Clementine’s snooty disdain for her working-class maid. And the past is seen anew through the present’s lens – witness Clementine’s relationship with the postal service, as intense as any 2020s teen’s with their smartphone.
It’s a kaleidoscopic ride through the psyche of women, then and now – in pursuit of Mr Darcy, in pursuit of likes – whose self-worth is pegged to their market value. It’s also a solo debut remarkable for Minnitt’s restless invention, and her palpable pleasure at discovering a trove of jokes hitherto disregarded by character comedy.
At Soho theatre, London, until 18 November and from 27 to 29 November
