Writers: Toby Hampton and Matthew Ballantyne
Director: Toby Hampton
Christmas comes but once a year. Thankfully.
A little nip of the wine previously intended for cooking. A five-minute breathing exercise with an app’s help. A guttural scream of rage into a folded tea towel inside a wardrobe. We are all allowed a range of tactics to overcome the unique annual stresses that cooking Christmas dinner for a crowd in double figures brings.
Tracy leans more towards the wine side as we spend an hour with her in her North London kitchen, shut off from her ungrateful and oblivious family as she tries to cater to all their various food wishes and whims. Treating us like a gossipy confidant sitting at her table, she takes us through this tense day as well as some key life events that led her here. It’s touching to get behind the wire of someone so defensive and guarded, and her backstory, while sad, is not so tragic as to be relatable to everyone.
It’s called 21 Round for Christmas, but in truth, there’s little discussion about 19 of them. We hear about Carole the annoying vegan. And Derek, Tracy’s husband, though mainly in relation to how he became the default choice after the rich, handsome Gregory abandoned our hero. We spend much of the time back in the past, uncovering Tracy’s younger years with an anecdote about attending a seance and her time spent misbehaving in fancy bars with her best friend Jackie and men rich enough to buy them fancy drinks and who can supply (unknowingly) full wallets which fuel the girls’ next few nights out.
While all this backstory, especially the complexity around Jackie’s current upsetting situation, is entertaining storytelling and nice to know about, it throws us off balance. We see too little of the impact all this life experience has had, and know too much about how it has been accumulated. It reaches into maudlin territory at times, but is saved in the end by a moment of revelation – clarity comes to her through the smoke from a rotten-smelling, burned vegan pie.
Cathay Conneff is fantastic as Tracy – ebullient and highly charismatic in her conspiratorial mode, inviting us to share the peaks and snags of her life at times and just as strong when conveying just how lonely this woman feels in her current incarnation. Toby Hampton and Matthew Ballantyne’s script is occasionally unbalanced but full of charm. Forget about the actual situation she finds herself in and the narrative around that, as a study of a character, a monologue with plenty of heart and drama, it’s a superb piece.
It’s not a traditional Christmas story by any stretch. It’s much more true to life. The ghosts of Tracy’s past are real. The difficulties are not about man’s grace and generosity to fellow man; instead, they’re about the sometimes painful journeys we all take to reach a life stage. Christmas comes around and we all reflect on our pasts. It’s nice to see this shared experience mirrored so thoughtfully and engagingly on stage.
Runs until 23 December 2023
