In a recent trilogy of shows, Sarah Kendall told long-form tales of her teenage years in Newcastle, Australia – tales that pirouetted on the line that separates truth from fiction (and indeed storytelling from standup). Her latest, One-Seventeen, deals as much with grownup as with adolescent Sarah, and tells not one long story but several interconnected short ones. Their connectedness is the point, at least according to Kendall’s closing tale, which invokes wonder at how lives (and stories) interrelate and overlap. But I’m not sure the show quite bears that philosophic weight: it’s absorbing from one moment to the next, but adds up to no more than the sum of its parts.
It’s introduced as “a show about luck”, and begins in 10-year-old Kendall’s garden, where her family gathers at night to watch Halley’s comet race across the sky. Stargazing is a recurring theme in a show that opposes two viewpoints on chance and mischance. To Kendall’s mum, almost everything can be construed as a bad sign. But her dad is phlegmatic: bad luck is often good luck in disguise.
These arguments recur throughout but aren’t really dramatised by the show, which leads us from astronomy via teenage friendship to hamster care, from infancy past adolescence to life as a middle-aged mum. Kendall is a skilled raconteur: it’s beguiling to follow her tales as they flow into and splinter off from one another. There are gripping moments, as she wrestles with her son’s autism diagnosis or retells the tall tale of her gran’s abduction by aliens.
But One-Seventeen lacks the forward propulsion of its predecessors, and the connective tissue between its stories (notwithstanding the claims made by Kendall’s climactic section) is weak. Occasionally, as when her brother reacts to a real-life car crash as if he were in The Dukes of Hazzard, the relationship between humorous form and serious subject matter feels awkward. Elsewhere they dovetail smoothly, and it’s easy to be seduced by a show that at least grapples with some big ideas about how fate, fortune and family connections ripple through the ages.
- At Soho theatre, London, until 19 May. Then touring.
