Writers and Directors: Beth Calverley and Beth Roberts
The Awkward Guide to Friendship is a beautiful, heartfelt and instructive examination of the challenging yet rewarding processes involved in engaging with others, manifested through the thoughtful, atmospheric poetry of Beth Calverley and swirling lyrical soundscapes of Beth Roberts: the Bristol-based duo House of Figs.
The Beths are intent on reassurance, making clear the fact that everyone finds initiating and sustaining friendships daunting at times, while offering thoroughly thought-out suggestions as to how these processes might be managed more comfortably. They’ve reached deep inside their experiences of loneliness and connection to produce stories and lines that are breathtakingly true and compelling.
People don’t like to admit that they’re inept at making friends or know very little about what it might involve. But it’s the vulnerability of admitting these things that makes people relatable.
Calverley, fragile and delicate-looking like a shy but shining angel, is so open and honest about her friendship issues – “When everyone else learned the rules… I wasn’t there” – that she enables the audience to dwell on similar instances in their own lives with ease. She speaks quietly but unfalteringly, and the audience is so keen to hear her mesmerising material that, when not gently laughing along, they listen in absolute silence.
Calverley’s quiet, contemplative reticence – the kid who was always in the library at school – complements Roberts’ gregarious volubility (unsurprisingly, she’s from a large family) and grounded common sense to perfection. Using examples from their own lives and people they’ve met in the course of performance (broadcast as recorded voice-overs), they’ve created a structured, easily digestible nine-point guide to beginning, maintaining and weathering friendships.
Presenting the process as helming a precarious sea voyage through occasional storms and choppy waters, Roberts puts on a naval hat at regular intervals to introduce sequential concepts to help travellers on the ‘friend’ ship journey at every stage, from ‘Asking questions and opening lines’ to ‘Try to wish them well’ via ‘It’s not always fine’: “On your right you can see the friendship heartbreakers rolling towards us.”
Roberts has written soothing lyrics for the audience to join in singing as a choir: “It won’t always be this hard.” There’s a lovely clarity and warmth to her voice that chimes impeccably with her self-penned guitar melodies. Sighing, keening and whooshing, she also uses a pedalboard to loop the emitted sounds into mystical backing tracks that suit Calverley’s phrasing to a T. Roberts also has the audience performing vocal and breathing exercises that alleviate any overwhelm.
Calverley describes the relationship arcs she’s progressed along with two friends, Hope and Faith, throughout school, college and early working life, projecting into the future to imagine elderly life together. She asks “How long is the school and friendship string?” and talks about de-prioritising and avoidance – “She kept me at the elbow length of messages and said it was just our busy lives getting in the way.”
Roberts remembers a dear friend from college who stopped talking to her and never explained why. “She had a lot of rules around being a girl… she called it beauty… all the untidy bits I had to hide… when I grew my own wings she didn’t like it when I started to fly.”
The Beths’ individual stories are interleaved with instances from their collaborative relationship: how they met, write and perform together. Calverley admits to being awed by Roberts – “you’re at the centre of so many circles” – and charts their tentative, occasionally failing but eventually triumphant phases: “Finally believing our luck.”
At the show’s ‘official’ end, Calverley asks the audience for “three little snapshots of friendship” around which she could improvise a poem. She’s given “chocolate cakes and rowan trees” (referring to a giver of amazing gifts), “the only person who’d give me a lift to the boulder field” and “we played tennis in the dark and the rain.” Calverley gazes calmly at the prompts for a minute and rustles up one of the highlights of the night: a truly affecting bespoke poem.
There’s always a risk of appearing mawkish with this sort of material, but the Beths’ down-to-earth humour and profound insights insure against this. As the show builds, offering up so many unexamined aspects of friendship, so does the realisation among the audience that despite all the clamour, distraction and manufactured enmity in the world, affection and attention are still vital for well-being and sense of self.
Immensely moving and improving, with real emotional heft, this simply staged yet magical piece merits staging in as many venues as possible throughout our sad, siloed and traumatised society (adding to the work that the Beths have already done in hospital and care settings). It would be invaluable in breaking down the fear around reaching out to others, and encouraging those who feel their ability to manage friendships is battered beyond repair.
The Awkward Guide to Friendship is one of the most human things you’ll ever see and is likely to have lasting therapeutic effects. Hopefully it’ll be showing in a venue near you soon.
Runs until 11 October 2026
