Writers: Tolu Fagbayi, James Tibbles, Ellie Birch and Matt Hansen
A collection of four monologues, Someone Else’s Shoes focuses on those whose voices are still marginalised to some extent. We hear stories about a gay evangelical, a man with a stammer, a woman who is unsure of her body and a young woman who is stared at while waiting at a bus stop. Each monologue is a little tour de force.
With a mixture of prose and rhyme. Lilith Wake plays a woman who is angry in the way that women are controlled, using the contraceptive pill as her first example. It’s a provocative beginning and a challenge to the usual liberatory narrative we are so used to hearing when it comes to the pill. Written by Tolu Fagbayi, You Say is full of surprises and Wake brings the character fully alive. She is cheeky and cheerful, even within her polemics, and charts her journey from home to the bus stop convincingly, her ideas about intersectional feminism never seeming out of place. There is one final surprise that completely pulls the rug from under the audience; a moment of pure theatre.
James Tibbles’ Altar Call is a tender and funny version of the coming out story. Tibbles plays a young man who is happy enough immersed in his religious community, but when he meets Rory in a church choir tour of Poland, he realises that he should face his same-sex desire. He finds it hard to square his queerness with his evangelical beliefs. The thrilling and moving climax of this short play takes place at the end of a service in the young man’s church where the preacher suggests that someone in the congregation is struggling with sin. Tibbles gives an exceptionally emotional performance.
The female character in Ellie Birch’s Better Off Not is awkward and hesitant, talking to the audience as if it’s a single person. She tells us that since she dislocated her jaw she can no longer give men oral sex. It may seem funny, but the character’s nervousness, brilliantly interpreted by Birch with ums and ahs and uncertain laughs, brings an undertow of sadness to the humour. She’s broken and isn’t sure how to fix herself. Likewise, Birch’s short play is brittle and beautiful.
The final monologue I Have A Voice is perhaps less nuanced than the others, preferring to be more direct in its storytelling. Matt Hansen examines the experiences of a young man who occasionally stammers and his strategies to avoid words that trigger this stammer, like prescription. He learns to live with his stammer, turning himself into a walking thesaurus, always ready with a string of other words if he struggles to say the first. Ending with advice to stammerers and non-stammerers alike I Have A Voice ends rousingly, but it rather dispenses with the narrative arc and we don’t learn enough about Hansen’s character.
And all this in 50 minutes, played in the intimate 2Nortdown in King’s Cross. Shoes litter the stage. Of course, each one of these monologues could be developed into longer pieces, but they are impeccably formed as they are. With strong storytelling and excellent acting, Someone Else’s Shoes are a perfect fit.
Reviewed on 2 August 2022
The Camden Fringe runs from 1 -28 August 2022
