Marie moves from a little village to a big city and it isn’t how she expected. She’s a little ridiculous herself: painfully naive and awkward. The first ten minutes of the show are spent on her simply saying the words ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to us in various ways. Perhaps it’s supposed to be funny, or perhaps it’s meant to represent her uncertainty... I’m not sure.
Lowri Jenkins is a gifted performer, but her talent seems wasted in a show that doesn’t quite know what it’s trying to do.
But it doesn’t work. It very quickly becomes boring and doesn’t add anything to the story. The same can be said for Marie’s telephone conversations with her mother, which keep cropping up time and time again. They grow tiresome very quickly. There’s only so many times you can hear someone say, ‘all right then Mum’, before you want to shout at them to just hang up the phone.
The surreality of the city is evoked well through beeps and voiceovers that make Marie’s trip to the supermarket feel more like a video game. Though she speaks of other people, she is alone on the bare stage, which highlights the sense of loneliness she feels in the busy city. She hopes to find love and friendship but all she finds is a lemon.
This show has potential, definitely, but at the moment it doesn’t work well as a whole. There doesn’t seem to be enough substance to the piece; aside from the phone conversations to the Mum (which could definitely be better), the show is made up of random movement sequences, patches where nothing at all really happens, and some bizarre lighting choices. Perhaps with better direction, a clearer vision or more material, this could feel like a full piece. Lowri Jenkins is a gifted performer, but her talent seems wasted in a show that doesn’t quite know what it’s trying to do.
