one4review | On 17, Aug 2024

A new play by writer and co-director Sophie Swithinbank, author of the multi award-winning Bacon, this is a one woman play performed by Phoebe Ladenburg, taking on the role as the mother.

When the play opens, the mother is sitting on a chair, facing the audience and talking to us. We quickly realise that she is in prison, that this is visiting hour, and she is in fact talking to her daughter, from whom she has been estranged for 12 years. The daughter has finally come to visit, after receiving numerous letters from her mother without replying. The mother wants to give her 12-year old daughter her version of the events that have led to her being imprisoned. We then flash back to the mother’s police interview, when she has come in to report her daughter as missing, but faces a 48 hour interrogation from the police. As the action flicks between prison visit and police interview, we learn that she is a single mother, and that she struggled to cope with life, a seemingly impossible journey of sleep deprivation, abandoned love, a short-lived office job and a fledgling acting career. This all leads her to shop lifting, which she thought she would be good at, being an actor; accusations of child abandonment and finally the true reason for her imprisonment. At times, the mother is charming and very convincing, but her recollections of events can also be blurry and unreliable, and we are left wondering just what to believe.

Ladenberg’s performance is powerful and compelling throughout, at times totally believable and engaging, but at other times she manages to portray perfectly the unreliability in her own narration of events. Swithinbank’s script is excellent, and the one-sided conversation keeps the audience completely engaged, but also questioning the truth of what we are hearing, as more details of a complex and downward-spiralling life are revealed. The ending was perhaps slightly rushed, causing it to lose some of its impact, but nevertheless, this is a compelling hour of fringe theatre and I would highly recommend catching it.

****

Reviewed by Howard
Summerhall, Tech Cube 0
13.55 (1hr 10)
Until 26th August (not 19th)