DramaFestivalsReviewScotland

Michelin Star – Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024, Space On The Mile

Reviewer: Tom Ralphs

Writer and Director: Holly Eve Bray

For a play that takes its name from a culinary reference, Michelin Start is curiously both undercooked and overcooked. Holly Eve Bray’s play, part of Queen Mary Theatre Company’s group of fringe shows this year, suffers from a script that feels more like an idea than a story, and a set of characters and situations that are exaggerated beyond the point of plausibility.

The play is set in the Cheslea flat of Toni (Emily Redpath) and Benji (Toby Attard) on an evening when they have invited Carla (Amelia Sabey) and her husband Antony (Tom Lafferty) over for a meal that they have got a chef in to cook. Carla is Toni’s best friend, or her best friend at work at least, as she is keen to point out. It also seems as if Carla may be having an affair with Benji and Toni might be having an affair with Antony. Add into the mix that Toni is flirting with the chef and possibly sleeping with them, and you have the ingredients for a modern day Ayckbourn play.

However, the ingredients alone don’t automatically make for a good meal. The two couples are so diametrically opposed that it seems unlikely that they would inhabit the same world, let alone be coming round for dinner at each other’s houses. Antony feels like a gross caricature of a Robin Askwith character from a 70s sex comedy, in contrast to the refined to the point of snobbishness that Toni epitomises. Benji is almost apologetic for even existing, while Carla is brash and dominant to such an extent that she’s more likely to scare him than excite him.

That they would be sleeping together doesn’t seem believable, and the farcical events that occur over the course of their evening together lack any subtlety, nuance or humour. There are several funny lines in the script and there is the potential for it to become something that takes the marital infidelity style comedies of the 1970s and turns them into a satirical look at relationships and monogamy in the 2020s, but it has a long way to go before it gets close to this.

Runs until August 24 (not 18th,19th,21st, 23rd) | Image: Contributed

Undercooked

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