Writer: Tim Stubbs Hughes
Director: Julia Stubbs
Printed A4 pages are pinned to the backdrop curtain. Some of them show women alone, in attitudes of pain, fear, or possibly demonic possession. Lilly, the protagonist of this intense one-woman show, later refers to the pages as her “research”. In the background, there’s an ominous ticking noise. Lilly enters in hoodie, tracksuit trousers and headphones, searching feverishly among the onstage papers.
Saving Myself is a fragmented soliloquy about the process of survival. Jessamy James plays Lilly, who has survived some kind of sexual assault. It is an outstanding performance, full of nuance and bitterness. To hold the audience’s attention through 45 minutes of monologue in which very little happens is an impressive theatrical feat. James is founder of all-female Shakespeare company The Whole Pack, already touring their fifth production, Macbeth, which appears at the same venue in September and should be worth watching.
In Saving Myself, directed by Julia Stubbs, James skilfully navigates the rambling hesitancies of the script. As a child, Lilly felt an urge towards violence: “some feeling inside me had got outside me.” Gradually, she is ostracised, with rumours springing up that she kills pets. Animals around her mysteriously die or disappear. “They never took me to the Zoo,” she says mirthlessly. There are very few props, but they are fraught with sinister, largely implied significance: a candle and matches, a wire coat hanger, some old clothes.
Saving Myself is Tim Stubbs Hughes’ first play, and it has moments of poetic repetition and raw emotion. The first word is a savage expletive, and the tension doesn’t lift. One problem is that, apart from revealing fractured details of Lilly’s trauma, the speech doesn’t really progress to any drama or illuminate her state of mind. She starts by saying she plans to “go back deeper, further,” but adds little to her circular thought patterns.
Some of the best lines come early on with Lilly’s self-perceived litany of failure (“Rode a bike – broke your arm; baked a cake – burnt it to a crisp; kissed a boy – wet your pants”). Hyperventilating, she tries to move beyond this pattern, but descends into inarticulacy (“Why do I? Why do I? what? What? What?”)
This is a thoughtful play with interesting aims, but maddeningly unspecific. It’s entirely reasonable to leave vague the details of the barely-remembered assault; it remains simply as a feeling on her skin, a discomfort “at the edge of me”, a sense that “he forced me”. But why could the folk-tale and ritual research not be more concrete?
Lilly refers repeatedly to “one of those women in the old stories…” where “she found another way to say it”, without detailing who or which or how. She occasionally begins “there was a woman…” but never progresses. Real-life interior monologues, especially among trauma survivors, are full of spirals, reiteration, duplication. But a satisfying drama needs to do more than replicate. It needs to find a way through the maze to a place of increased clarity.
Runs until 20 August 2026
Camden Fringe 2026 runs until 30 August
