16 Postcodes – 4**** - One4Review
one4review | On 10, Aug 2024
Jessica Regan warmly welcomes her audience into the Pleasance Bunker and her Irish charm wins us over from the start. Her early life in Ireland was spent with no postcodes (apart from in Dublin) but she has more than made up for the lack of them since moving to London. The backdrop to the stage is a string with 16 cards containing the postcodes she has lived in since moving to London. She starts with Acton, and ends with Walthamstow, but the audience chooses the locations in-between. As each card is removed from the line, she tells a story of her time in that place. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it‘s scary and sometimes it’s bittersweet. When she moved to London, she was in love with the idea of being a Londoner – but what does that actually mean?
Jessica’s tales charmed us all, and she was able to effortlessly include the cries of a baby in the audience in her tales. She doesn’t cover all 16 postcodes in the hour, and I would love to know what happened in the other postcodes. Such an itinerant lifestyle must be dispiriting, and we do get a sense of that with her final tale, but her light touch didn’t explore the darker side to any great extent, which may have made this a more rounded piece of theatre. However, I did thoroughly enjoy my travels around London with Jessica as did the cheering audience.
****
Reviewed by Rona
3.30pm (1hr)
Pleasance Courtyard – Bunker One
Until 26th August (not 12)
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