My Own Show

This well written play by Lesley Bruce was first performed in Scarborough in 2006 and centres on a TV chat show host, worried that her popularity is on a downward slope, being reunited with an old school friend on This Is Your Life and having an idea to help her resurrect her career.  However, the friend has suffered herself since leaving school and things don’t quite turn out as Fay plans.

It’s a five hander, including one male, and in this production the performers were very well balanced.  Rosalie Abel, who directed the play, also had to step in to play the role of the fading star Fay at relatively short notice and achieved her dual goals with aplomb.  She was strongly supported by all the other actors as her three friends Jude (Karen McCarthy), Gillian (Angela Guiver) and Bollards (Anne Dobson) and Chris Wales as Bollards’s son Allan who has a few problems himself and spends his time making life size models of Dinky toys!

Bollards causes the trouble in the camp.  She was forced to marry at 16 having fallen pregnant by one of her teachers, who is now dead having been killed in an accident at the couple’s home.  But she has a new found appetite for life and the play shows us an interesting transformation of Fay and Bollards with the latter ending up with her own show.

I was particularly struck not only by the strength of the performances but by some delightful timing and delivery of the dialogue.  There were also some excellent effects on a good set which doubled as a sitting room and a TV studio.

Scenes moved quickly on with brief blackouts which allowed no more than maybe a change of personnel or positions on stage.

Lighting was good and the entire performance was well appreciated by an audience which at times seems totally immersed in the action.

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