Writer: Lauryn Redding
Director: Bryony Shanahan
Staged like a small concert on a three-platform stage designed by Amanda Stoodley and playing at the Soho Theatre until the end of July, Lauryn Redding’s one-woman show Bloody Elle blends live music performance with dramatic storytelling and the wistful memory of a formative love affair. Nominally placing the central lovers on either side of a north-south class divide reflected through character behaviours and scene setting, this ‘gig-musical’ explores burgeoning sexual preferences and the hard road to self-acceptance.
Working at a fast-food restaurant in 2009 with a crew of distinctive teenage colleagues, Elle is asked to teach the job to new girl Eve. Through a series of shifts and nights out, an unexpected connection grows between them, but Elle is from a high-rise tower block and Eve is destined for Oxford followed by a career in medicine and then a traditional family, so what chance does their summer romance really stand?
Redding’s 95-minute show has found interesting ways to blend the performer’s original music within the storytelling structure of Bloody Elle. This is not a traditional musical with book and lyrics, and instead, Redding uses both approaches to cut across one another, interrupting the protagonist’s songs with the beginning of the next scene as characters such as Elle’s mother disturb her reverie and, likewise, uses music as a fundamental part of Elle’s identity, expressing the deeper emotions emerging from her relationship with Eve and conveying those to the audience.
The characterisation in Bloody Elle is one of its greatest assets with Redding bringing to life a great cast of comedy colleagues including a laddish love rival, a quiet but thoughtful friend and the pot washer who loves the drama. And the feeling of youthful verve, of this group working and partying together, is very well drawn, as is the love of the city and the satisfaction Elle feels with her life until Eve comes along.
Focusing on Elle’s perspective, Redding captures the thrill and fear of first love, the physical stirring of emotions and the wells of disappointment it generates, the fragility of that feeling and how easy it is to break. That is well balanced with the nervousness of developing same-sex feelings when everyone around her is demonstrably homophobic, and there is sensitivity in Bloody Elle about the difficulty of coming out and the effect of those tentative experiences.
But the show struggles to make Eve a convincing love interest either in Elle’s descriptions of her or the performance of her character. The story never provides a convincing reason why someone like Eve would take a job in the restaurant and the surface presentation of her as well-spoken with a big house and a big future never fully squares with the implied rebelliousness that brings the pair together. For all the investment, excitement and pain that Elle feels, ultimately Eve is just never real enough to the audience to justify the play’s 95-minute running time.
First performed at the Royal Exchange in 2021 and transferring to the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe, Redding has taken a simplified story and inventively woven music around it, creating a warm and likeable central character whose story is full of pathos. But it becomes a one-sided love affair in more ways than one.
Runs until 29 July 2023
