07/08/23

The Front Room, Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh

The last time we saw Alison Skilbeck, she was playing the role of Mrs Roosevelt in the comparative luxury of Studio 5, George Square. This year she’s appearing in The Assembly’s Front Room, a converted shipping container, but – as ever – she gives the performance her all, and we might as well be in a park somewhere in London, where the piece is set.

We first saw a Skilbeck performance back in 2017 (The Power of the Crone) and we’ve made a point of tracking her shows ever since, always interested to see where she’ll go next. The delightful thing is that we never really know what we’re going to get.

This year, she performs a collection of self-written monologues, set during lockdown. It features five human characters and one that … well, I don’t want to give too much away. As ever, she does that thing she always does, putting on a hat or a pair of fairy wings and suddenly inhabiting the character the item belongs to. These characters are not all female and they range from childhood to old age, but there’s something that interlinks them all, something we’re not fully aware of until the conclusion.

It’s a lovely piece of writing, gentle and lyrical, which captures the nuances of everyday speech with considerable skill, and an hour and ten minutes slips easily by. Along the way we are given some thoughtful insights into the human condition through the words of strangers we somehow end up caring about.

If this sounds like your cup of tea, it’s all waiting for you in a tin box on George Street.

4 Stars

Philip Caveney