Boots – The Bunker Theatre, London

Writers: Sacha Voit with Jessica Butcher

Director: Nadia Papachronopoulou

Reviewer: Maryam Philpott

It has been a big week for high street shops on stage, and with Timpson: The Musicalcurrently playing at the King’s Head Theatre it is rather timely that Sacha Voit and Jessica Butcher’s new play Bootsabout a pharmacist working at the well-known chain has also opened at The Bunker Theatre. Although quite different experiences, both shows foreground the stories of ordinary women in everyday situations.

Willow enjoys her role behind the prescription counter at Boots but with a scientific interest in the medicinal properties of trees, she also maintains an external research career. Frequent customer Liz is caring for a husband with Parkinson’s while coming to terms with a life she never wanted, and before long these two lonely women are unexpectedly drawn together, bonding over missed opportunities and a shared love of the forest.

Voit and Butcher have a craft a very funny tribute to intergenerational friendship and the supportive, connected experience of women. It is a piece that consistently subverts your expectations, drawing parallels between these lives to emphasise the take-home message that like trees, what we see on the surface is only a fraction of who people are, roots are deep and far reaching.

The character of Liz is the best example of this, she looks like a slightly fussy old woman, another customer when we first meet her determined to annoy Willow with her demands. But in monologues delivered as much to herself as to the audience, her story unfolds, first with a delicious humour and then with the sadness that underlies so much of her story instantly making her a character you could watch all night.

Amanda Boxer dominates the show with a performance that brilliantly traverses the more carefree comic aspects of the character that seem to perfectly underscore the quiet sadness of her life. She speaks her mind, talks openly about her experience of sex and is determined in her views, snaffling all the best lines. Enjoying a crafty smoke in the woods on the way home she tells us “I know it’s awful for you, but I have to die of something” soon followed-up by a spectacular dismissal of scented sanitary towels with the line “who wants their whistle to smell of potpourri in a cheap hotel lobby”. But Boxer makes you feel for her too, the position of women 50 years ago forcing her down a path that contained and frustrated her.

Willow is a harder to character to reach, and while Tanya Loretta Dee’s performance is full of wavering restraint, reflecting Willow’s struggle to repress her inner turmoil, the final section of the play reveals a childhood tragedy that feels too sensationalist and under-developed in comparison to the much small-scale storytelling elsewhere. The cantankerous connection and burgeoning companionship that grows between these very different women is really much stronger and, while perhaps a less dramatic finale, should be reward enough for the character investment that has been created.

With an 80-minute run time Bootscovers a lot of ground, from the communication between tree roots to marital rape, stillbirth, postnatal depression and infertility which are often skirted over too rapidly to for real effect. Really, Voit and Butcher’s play is a character piece about female friendship with two women who just don’t realise how much they need each other, and there’s plenty of dramatic mileage in that.

Runs until 16 March 2019 | Image: Tim Kelly