Writer: Belle-Ann Daly-Morgan
Young playwright Belle-Ann Daly-Morgan comes on stage to tell us she’s managed to write and put on this show and form a theatre company all before she turned 20: an impressive achievement.
Don’t Call Me Blondie is a series of six monologues, all written by Daly-Morgan, about ‘love, lust and heartbreak’. The monologue isn’t a soft option in terms of theatrical writing, however, and Daly-Morgan’s inexperience is evident. A classic monologue – think Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads – depends on irony, the individual characters revealing far more about themselves than they realise. The limitations of the six characters in Don’t Call Me Blondie are that, although most of them reveal their naivety and neediness, there is little ironic distance, and it’s not clear how Daly-Morgan wants us to respond to them.
Characters need to be given context and a certain amount of granular detail to bring them alive. The absence of this in White Noise, played by Lily-Jo Walters, makes it hard to engage with her character. In terms of dialogue across the six monologues, the language lacks precision and tends to fall into clichés, particularly about mental health issues. Reece Marshall gives the stand-out performance as Ted in There’s Always the South of France, in which he talks mischievously about his relationship with Hinge.
Luiis Rouf, in Pick Me, From Over Yonder, also gives a strong performance, but his monologue as he anxiously pens a love letter has little structure and tends to go round in circles. That’s another element the monologues lack: a strong sense of storytelling. So although the stories of Yas (Pia Marr) in Never a God and Ari (Lillie Barlow) as Ari in Don’t Call Me Blondie, focus on different aspects of queer love, what isn’t clear is the degree to which they’re written to expose the characters’ delusions – or whether we’re supposed to identify with them.
An Ode to the Other Woman is played by Sophie Macnair and is the most ambitious of the monologues, focusing on a single woman in a relationship with a married man. Macnair herself gives a sophisticated performance, but it feels derivative, as if she’s trying too hard to channel Phoebe Waller-Bridge in Fleabag.
Reviewed on 13 August 2025
Camden Fringe runs until 24 August 2025
