Waiting

A one-woman show written by and starring Kate Farrell as Edna Gould, an old woman waiting at the doctor’s office and talking, as old women sometimes do, in an at-length, somewhat bruised, somewhat resilient, essentially polite and rationalising ramble about all sorts of minutiae about her memories of family and her widowed life, from her daughter who married up and doesn’t really have much time for her anymore, to her gay son who ran off to London to become a celebrity hairdresser, to her late husband Len who she speaks of lovingly even while the details reveal a brooding and distant man.

There are all sorts of moving details in it, particularly the way she talks about the imprint Len left on the chair he died in, and the pride she speaks of about downsizing to a small granny flat with new furniture and central heating, as opposed to back in the old house when Len didn’t like to waste money by turning the bars up on the electric heater.

The website description advises us to “think Alan Bennett meets Roald Dahl”, and throughout it I was a little perplexed by that, as its monologuing, bittersweet style seems completely Bennett and not at all Dahl. And then there's one line, very late in the game, that upends the whole thing. It was a very clever rug-pull, and revealed Farrell to be much slyer than was possibly imaginable from her spellbindingly convincing performance, full of eyes misty with a real sense of memory and emotion conflicted by repressed manners. I did wonder if it was a bit glib for the show to make us care so much about Edna only to go for such a gag, but it really is the kind of move Dahl pulled so brilliantly in the best of the Tales of the Unexpected stories, and it recasts the whole piece with an added dimension about the unforgiving absurdity of life. This is a skilful show, and I’d be very interested to discover more of what Farrell has created.

This was a brilliant one woman show. Beautifully written and skilfully delivered by Kate Farrell who became Edna. As a member of the audience, I was riveted from begin to end. Well done, Kate.

Intelligently written - and beautifully delivered. Kate is an absolute star!