Writer: Christie Peto
Director: Sophie McMahon
Very often, plays about internal misery and anxiety are one-person plays, for the perfectly fair reason that they don’t technically need anyone else for an inner monologue. But it mostly gets a bit tiring, listening to one-person panic for an hour or more.
Christie Peto’s Three has found an ingenious way around this, by inviting Hannah Harquart to play Peto’s inner cheerleader. Always on her side, occasionally they disagree, but ultimately Peto is for being happy, and Harquart is the ideas woman: Buy a karate kit from Lidl, Harquart suggests, and Peto does it; take up the flute, says Harquart, and three weeks later, Peto’s got Three Blind Mice down pat. Listen to classical music while holding a candle, Harquart enthuses, and Peto, nails digging in to the wax, worries she’s doing it wrong.
It’s a very gentle, simple story, but that’s what makes it so relatable: Peto isn’t a crazy, deranged person, she’s just a bit frayed, unsure how to fix herself, and trying not to make a big deal about it. Comic timing is faultless and – the stamp of quality for British comedy – the line between a scene of great emotional import and one of comic relief is nearly non-existent. It’s as though Peto and Harquart are comic actors stuck in a tragedy, or the other way around perhaps.
Whilst there are no bells and whistles in the production value, effort has been made so as not to demand the audience merely imagine everything: a rubber ducky has been procured, a silken kimono borrowed, a triangle snaffled. And that’s plenty; no need to overcomplicate.
It’s a small story with massive implications, elegantly capturing the quiet distress caused by modern life, and somehow leaving audience members with a bit of hope for Peto and for themselves.
Runs until 20 November 2022
