DramaLondonReview

Totally Fine – The Hope Theatre, London

Reviewer: Phoebe Taplin

Writer: Susanna Wolff

Director: Dean Graham

Anton Chekhov insisted that playwrights should “never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off.” In Susanna Wolff’s compelling one-woman show Totally Fine, the box of tissues near the central armchair feels a little like Chekhov’s gun. Will the protagonist use the tissues before her hour-long therapy session ends? She does cry – reluctantly and more than once – before her time is up, but she is also frequently funny. And angry. And bitter, contemptuous, despairing, defensive. Sometimes uncomfortable but always watchable, Totally Fine cycles through a kaleidoscope of emotions.

A nameless therapist, burned out and brittle with exhaustion, arrives at another therapist’s office. She comments on the waiting room set-up with its “ornamental fruit next to the suicide support leaflets”, the extra-large box of tissues (“you must be good”) and later, after a long pause, “excellent use of silence by the way”. This self-conscious, critical view of her position on “this side of the chair” is coupled with an initial insistence that the session is totally unnecessary, that she just needs “a break, a beach with no internet access.”

Throughout the show, Wolff reads from a questionnaire about mental wellness, including multiple choice answers of the always-often-sometimes-rarely-never variety. It provides a series of useful pivots and prompts, shifting the narrative from anecdote to commentary and back again, creating far more than a monologue. In the course of remembering her recent past, she re-enacts scenes in clubs and festivals, her practice with its many mimicable clients, and her lonely rented flat. Dean Graham’s direction and George Turner’s design help create a flickering range of scenes on the small and minimally furnished stage.

This fringe-style one-act play is a model of its genre. Often laugh-out-loud funny, Wolff’s emotional journey is also poignant and thought-provoking. “We get it,” she says caustically near the start; “your dad left when you were ten and now you have long-term abandonment issues … Big fucking yawn”. Another character is described as stinking of “Chanel and insecurity”, one of a group she has dubbed “soulless Sallies”. The narrator’s initial mockery of her wealthy clients’ needs parallels a lack of compassion for her own psychological crisis. Both slowly change over the course of a revelatory hour.

Reviewed on 18 January 2025. Runs from 27 February to 1 March 2025 at Hen & Chickens Theatre

The Reviews Hub Score

Poignant and funny

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The Reviews Hub - London

The Reviews Hub London is under the editorship of Richard Maguire. The Reviews Hub was set up in 2007. Our mission is to provide the most in-depth, nationwide arts coverage online.

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