★★★★☆

Review by Tony Frame. Venue 24. Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose – Snug @ 13:40

Charlotte Anne-Tilley brings the small venue at the Gilded Balloon to life with her solo show about a young woman making her way in the world, as she flees the nest from her parental home in Macclesfield.

The bright lights of London and a dream job as a hostess at Dino-World is the next stop. And it’s from there that our protagonist has to deal with the harsh reality of a working-class life away from home, of having to deal with sexual harassment and the pressures of finding love via online dating, all the while pretending to her parents that life is great and just peachy.

What I loved about the show was the way Charlotte’s writing immersed me into the scenes; she didn’t spend ages setting them up (and thus distracting you from the plot), no…there was just the right amount of descriptive information which helped create her environments and locations, all of which she then filled with multiple characters that she portrayed with such skill it was like she had been doing this for a lot longer than her years would say. I’m talking about little nuances in posture and body language, facial expressions (not to mention spot-on accents), all of which helped us (the audience) recognise immediately who was in the scene, the type of character they were, their traits, their faults.

The pace of the one-hour show was excellent, no scene dragged, blocking and scene changes were fluid (kudos to directors Lorna McCoid, Evie Appleson), there was just the right amount of humour in the right places, and it avoided a few clichés that one might have expected due to the subject matter. And whilst it is a strong realistic piece of feminist theatre, it carefully avoids being misandristic due to a character choice in the latter part of the drama when things came to a crux.

The whole juxtaposition between Charlotte’s character wearing a pink dinosaur outfit amidst the harsh reality of the world around her made it feel like a grim fairy-tale of sorts. And a splendid one at that. A highly recommended show that was engaging, with finely-tuned writing, and a performance that felt real and was devoid of pretension.