Writer: Lisa Sa
Director: Valentina Rosati
Come August, Edinburgh will be shoulder-to-shoulder with solo shows about heartbreak and healing. Emotionally Undercooked – caught at its first preview, in a 50-seat room above a London Bridge pub – will arrive among them carrying one weapon: Lisa Sa’s gift for character. What the show does with that weapon is another matter.
Sa’s autobiographical show narrates a dating history that culminates in Dylan: the boyfriend of the title, rendered as a wavering lump, whose failings she diagnoses with the calm of a woman who has, by her own account, done the work. She plays every role, physically pivoting mid-conversation – a device that somehow survives the hour. Her strict improv teacher, resplendent in a palm-tree shirt, speaks with an enunciation that bends and swerves but always lands stern: a teacher to revere and fear. Her Canary Wharf spa host is android in tone yet all sway and snap in the hips. Comic creations, dryly timed; the room chuckles.
The weakest character, oddly, is Lisa Sa. Her moments of undefended vulnerability – real regret flickering through the account of how relationships ended – are smothered each time by the righteousness that follows. The script speaks fluent therapy, littered with contemporary Americanisms: “I have a background doctorate in trauma,” she announces – a fatal second-hand idiom, delivered with a self-congratulating expression that expects applause. Met with none. In autobiography, one cannot outsource the language.
Dylan’s behaviour, we are assured, is explained by his being a man less grown than she. The show never entertains the possibility that writing an hour about how much more grown one is than their ex is not, on the whole, what grown or healed people do. When Sa closes by sitting down to begin writing the play we have just watched, the bow is tied on the self-regard.
The preview roughness, it should be said, costs little. When a funky circus tune erupts into a serious scene – “wrong sound prompt,” she shrugs, to warm laughter – the semi-stand-up show absorbs it whole; in an evening this candid, the seams barely register as seams. The bones are strong: likewise, the character work, the timing, the ease with the room. There is a month before Edinburgh, and for now, the title does double duty as the verdict.
Reviewed on 2 July 2026 and then at Edinburgh
