Writer: Mollie Blue
Director: Shardé Neikaiya
Mollie Blue plays The Agent in her hilarious comedy, Please don’t fall in love with me (it’s really not sexy when that happens), playing at the Camden Fringe. She runs a naughty knicker shop in Soho, assisted by her daft assistant, named in the programme as Bimbo. Their most regular visitor, The Boy, works across the way in a record shop and just comes in to hang out with the pair.
Blue is a fabulous performer, all saucy moves and sultry glances. She delivers what is essentially a monologue, spelling out her philosophy. She wants to behave like a man: essentially to act with the sheer confidence to demand what she wants. Her superpower, she tells us, is sex. She knows what her customers want, and she wants to get them to part with their money. In the course of the play, she imaginatively anatomises a whole range of types who come to buy her wares.
Meanwhile, her daft assistant (Poppy -Anne Taplin) tries to wrestle lacy underthings onto a mannequin whose arms keep falling off. She has a touch of Alice from The Vicar of Dibley, worrying about carbs, while evidently having no idea what a carb might be. Are there carbs in sausage rolls? she asks innocently. And what she gets up to when she thinks no one’s watching is hilarious, her angular dance to I’m Feeling Horny is a particular joy. So we’re laughing at her naïve whackiness at the same time as gasping at Mollie Blue’s saucy moves and knowing, highly articulate talk.
The action is regularly punctuated by a call on the pink vulva-shaped phone, every day the same caller. Ryan Dickson is perfect as the perv, adopting different accents to make the same enquiries about knickers, stockings, suspender belts, etc. His story changes each day. He wants a present, improbably for his auntie. Or his grandmother. Blue indulges his fantasies until – well, the job is done. But Dickson easily switches from unwholesome phone caller to the thoroughly wholesome, if cheeky Boy, and it’s his friendship with Blue that is one of the delights of the show.
Shardé Neikaiya with confidence, and Daniel Munday as movement director does a fine job. Blue’s writing is pin-sharp, her characters intelligently imagined, and despite all the talk of crotchless knickers, there’s definitely a hint of a literary background in the mix. Lovely stuff.
Reviewed on 21 August 2025
Camden Fringe runs until 24 August 2025
