Annie Hughes, as played by writer/performer Ellie Ross, is cheerfuly meandering through life when her posh parents make her an offer she should probably refuse. If she gets married by the age of 35, they’ll give her £150,000.
This is an hour of tightly written, well-paced comic monologue. On the surface, it’s a cheerily inconsequential romcom, in the Curtis style, as some wealthy white English types blunder around in their guilded lives. But in its deceptively gentle, carefully observed way, Mrs Gary Breath feels savage – at its best, a denouncement of the claustrophobia of heteronormative expectations.
Ross plays all the characters that orbit Annie, many of whom sound like Prince Harry. First, we meet her parents, in an excruciating early restaurant scene. There’s the loaded Brexity dad, interacting with a Romanian waitress with faux-bluff awkwardness, and the passive-aggressive mum, whose early comment about Annie’s trousers acts as a microcosmic criticism of her life choices as a whole.
Incidentally, these choices are pretty mainstream. Annie is in a sensible, professional job. She’s doing alright. But in the eyes of her well-to-do family, she’s “quirky”, and in danger of a fate worse than death – being “left on the shelf”.
Soon, Annie hits upon the caper upon which the whole narrative hinges – simply pretend to get married, to her nice-but-dim best mate whom she has known since forever, and pocket the money. Surely, nothing can go wrong.
Marriage, one of our most toxic and stifling institutions, gets a well-deserved kicking throughout. Elle’s rant to Alexa, her unfortunately named sister in law, about the different expectations of brides and grooms is funny, succinct, and righteous – if not exactly breaking new ground.
There are a lot of awful people in this play, who are all trapped in their own well-to-do, terrible, respectable lives. Ross is deft enough to tightly portray characters like Annie’s parents, her vacuous siblings, and her fake fiancee with great economy, so we don’t have to spend too much time with them.
More redeemable are characters like Jess, her husband-to-be’s actual girlfriend, whose acquiescence with the plan is shown with some hilariously blunt but leading statements.
Annie herself is very well drawn, reacting to criticism of her plan with self-deprecation, self-mockery, and, ultimately, self-defeat. Evasive desperation as the go-to – this is the English way.
There are a few things your correspondent would love to have seen explored more deeply. It would have been great to know how this family had hoarded so much wealth, and how many lives they had ruined in the process. This wouldn’t have needed to be stated explicitly, but some dark hints would have been enjoyable.
It was also not fully believable to learn that Annie is still renting. Surely her parents wouldn’t have let her suffer such an a grim fate, as it’s very difficult to be “doing ok”, as the character claims, as a single person on a music teacher’s wage.
Ultimately, though, this is a fun romp through the toxic expectations of straight, wealthy, mainstream culture.
Reviewed on 7th May. Runs to the 9th May
