Jesse North is Broken – York Theatre Royal Studio

Writer: Martha Godber

Director: Millie Gaston

This latest offering from the John Godber Company is described by playwright/sole performer Martha Godber as a “fearless” depiction of modern life, but it isn’t really. Jesse North is a 25-year-old carer from Hull, working with old people, and at the outset there is the merest glimpse of her working life taking blood pressure, administering medication and all the messier aspects of her job. The final 10 minutes or so find her caring for a 94-year-old woman, comparing her in her youth with Jesse’s crazy life-style and aiming the odd shaft in the direction of society/the government.

However, the main body of the play – maybe 45 minutes – is devoted to illustrating that crazy life-style – a typical Friday night. Jesse gets all dressed up and goes out to her favourite club with Jimmy, her gay best friend, celebrating his 23rd birthday. They drink plenty, she gets picked up by Danny and in a crisis of conscience leaves Jimmy and heads off for Danny’s flat. After sex in record time, with Danny now sleeping, a pizza mysteriously appears, a sense of reality sets in and she sets off walking back to the centre. A collision with a lamp-post and ordering the wrong kebab later, she realises it’s 4 o’clock and heads home to find Jimmy in her front garden.

Now the key piece of information is that, relatively early on, she received a text message from a colleague pleading illness and asking Jesse to stand in for her – at 6 o’clock in the morning! As she drives off from home, with a cocktail of booze inside her, that really is fearless!

The play is better than this bald summary makes it sound. Martha Godber has a gift for rendering the details of the young’s search for pleasure seem graphic by imaginative vocabulary, down-to-earth detail and, especially, her talent for clever rhymes. As a performer she confidently strides through all the impersonations and drunken decisions (and non-decisions). At the end, she achieves an improbable gentleness.

Despite the advance publicity this is not really a searing account of the failures of our welfare system, more a well written and well performed depiction of something rather more familiar and rather less challenging: one young woman and her Friday night to forget – until next Friday.

Runs until 14th May 2026