Lorna Irvine reviews A Play, a Pie and a Pint's latest show.
Stef Smith has a great ear for monologue; her latest play, new for this season's PPP, is a fine example of this.
Paula, a children's community worker played naturalistically by Pauline Goldsmith, sits in a Travelodge on the eve of an awards ceremony where Falkirk City Council have decreed her to be 'Woman Of the Year', an accolade which both bemuses and delights her (“It's reductive...not that I'm not grateful, though,” she muses). Sitting up all night, she starts to pick apart the fabric of her life, from twelve-year-old bed-wetter to hedonistic twenty-something to her present day life as middle-aged mother to ten year old Tom and wife to Ewan, a bluff Yorkshireman.
As she drinks wine on her own, sitting on the bed and contemplating her speech and ego, the monologue becomes confessional, awkwardly so—sometimes it's like a drunk stranger oversharing on the Tube. Debbie Hannan has directed Goldsmith almost in real time, and this adds a lovely authenticity to the piece. She speaks of the fatal overdose of best friend and fellow Siouxsie and the Banshees fan, Joan, in a hotel room, and how this haunted her throughout her life, and a passionate affair she had while married.
A likeable, flawed portrait is spun, simple in tone but filled with the small, poignant moments that detail a person’s life—the choices and both the horrors and triumphs that follow. Paula is self-aware and yet witty. “I'm in Hell...and Hell doesn't even have a minibar,” she quips, draining the dregs of her wine bottle.
Bookended by Siouxsie and the Banshees' early singles Hong Kong Gardenand Happy House, it made me want to immediately dig out my Banshees albums on vinyl—and I don't even do nostalgia.
Run ended
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