Writer: Jaylie Wayling
Director: Karol Olszewski
Social anxiety can be crippling. For writer-performer Jaylie Wayling, it leads to constant over-analysis of various interactions, to the point where she convinces herself that everyone hates her. In Eat. Sleep. Ruminate. Repeat., she has even constructed a PowerPoint presentation about how Laura, someone she met briefly three years ago, must have hated her – based almost solely on the shape her eyebrow made as she said, “Lovely to meet you.”
To help her break out of this cycle, Wayling brings on “Jaylie 2.0”, another performer (uncredited in the programme) playing a version of herself who has her life and her anxieties sorted out. The hope is that this new, more confident version of Jaylie will show her how to get to that point herself.
As a concept, it’s a powerful one. This fabricated version of Jaylie is the personification of “fake it till you make it”, and also echoes what the “real” Jaylie talks of as she describes masking her anxieties from the outside world. Wayling has constructed a scenario that allows her to explore her mental health in ways that are both amusing and informative, without being preachy.
Unfortunately, the interactions between the two Jaylies often get in the way of that good intent. Sniping and resentment between the two all too frequently become shouting matches, robbing their portrayals of some of the nuance that the subject matter needs. There are some fun moments – the attempt to perform a quick onstage costume change is handled well, especially on a fringe micro budget, and the dawning realisation that Jaylie 2.0 is, indeed, susceptible to the same vulnerabilities as her real-life self speaks volumes.
However, there are also too many moments where the comic timing is off, where the dialogue becomes circular in ways that don’t accentuate the cycle of obsession Wayling is trying to articulate, and where the play descends into two actors screaming at each other.
The strength of Wayling’s writing, and indeed the whole concept behind the show, is currently all too front-loaded. Once the two Jaylies start bickering with each other, Eat. Sleep. Ruminate. Repeat. loses that spark that promises so much. As the show spills past its billed 50-minute running time by at least ten more minutes, the sense of diminishing returns takes additional hold.
As it is, all sympathy for Jaylie’s plight is at serious risk of ebbing away altogether. For those in the audience who recognise the character’s behaviour in themselves, that’s especially frustrating.
Reviewed on 3 September, then at Jack Studio Theatre on 4 September 2025
