Writer: Zuzana Spacirova
Director: Oettie Devriese
London is at once an exciting and awful place to live; it’s welcoming and forbidding which is why Zuzana Spacirova’s character Diana has such a difficult time thinking of it as home in her new play Runaway. Premiering at the Camden Fringe ahead of a run at the Edinburgh Festival, this 60-minute piece focuses on rounds of jobs, auditions, boyfriends and moving between equally dreadful flats while struggling to commit to anything for very long.
Diana moves to London full of excitement having learned to perfect her English by watching Downton Abbey. When hardly anyone speaks like that, she struggles to make her mark and ends up in a lonely part of town waiting for her big break. As the years pass, London doesn’t get any easier and, wondering if she has made all the wrong choices, Diana floats from one opportunity to the next.
Spacirova’s show is structured like a stand-up routine, flitting between topics each accompanied by a relevant anecdote. In the space of a few minutes, Runaway covers the character’s working life as a waitress, spools back to her childhood love of Technicolor films musicals and sketches a difficult relationship with her parents. Spacirova’s observations are often very funny and keenly drawn but while there is plenty of energy, the show is a whirlwind of information that could better apply its dramatic tools to create greater shape.
There lots of sub-characters that appear including charming but slightly intense boyfriend Charlie and a loathed flatmate who proves ultimately helpful. Both could be better drawn and part of the challenge of writing a one-person show is making everyone else in the story feel just as tangible as the leading role. The audience need to believe they are real, to get a sense of them as people, of conversations that have taken place and the absence they leave behind. Runaway could build up some of these relationships to create some context for Diana’s existence.
Without them, the story is all reaction, the protagonist listing things that happen to her instead of actively living them, and it is this that gives it that retrospective stand-up feel instead of taking the audience back in time to a series of unfolding experiences. This would also create opportunities for some self-reflection at key moments, to understand why she names and feels deeply attached to inanimate objects and whitegoods, how Diana has existed for nine years with few friends to lean on and the contradictions of her romantic/commitment-phobic love life.
Runaway has a lot of the pieces, but they just need to be put together a little differently. Spacirova is a great storyteller with a way of defining people, even Englishness, that is pointed and she has curated her hilarious experiences in smart and engaging ways. She is also a warm presence on stage, a heroine the audience can invest it and root for as she navigates the weird and brilliant and awful experience of living in London. But the show needs some structured drama to match the comedy.
Runs until 1 August 2023
Camden Fringe runs until 27 August 2023
