An emotional strip-tease
Review of Alison Skilbeck’s ‘Are There More of You’
It’s difficult to not like Alison Skilbeck – all four of her. Turning in a nuanced performance of her one woman show ‘Are There More of You?’ last weekend, Alison played to a sold out auditorium at the British Council. In interviews, she’s frank about her dislike of being typecast because of her age, and as if to prove her point, she takes four stereotypes and turns them into real, complicated women. Establishing an almost fierce connection with her audience, she performs the equivalent of an emotional strip tease - peeling away the layers of pretence and habit to reveal the contradictions and the raw vulnerabilities that run just beneath.
Claire: The usually impeccably well-mannered Ambassador’s wife has taken to swearing a great deal since her husband left her for a new life with a younger, ostensibly more adven- turous woman. Now, she’s discovering the artist lurking inside her – an unconventional, new woman who hesitates only briefly before getting blood on her hands.
Sophia: The owner of the local Italian café is garrulous, proud and only a little ashamed of wishing her mother dead. She dreams of running her own little trattoria but ‘mamma mia’ seems determined to jeopardise her every plan.
Sara: the spirit weaver has finally found her safe place. Now she’ll do whatever she can to help her clients, even the sceptical ones. She’ll unknot your weave and answer any delicate questions you have – like how one makes love in a weave? But her newest customer seems to have come to her with an ulterior motive. Sam: A straight talking businesswoman meets with two men in a restaurant, one she clearly admires and another she is rather contemptuous of. By the end of the night, she’s very drunk and verging on heartbreak. She needs a friend, and is about to find one in an unlikely place.
Each woman’s story, is served up with a twist, and the audience is given the chance to be there, in the very moment they make their leap into a new life or resign themselves to the ones they already have. Each story is laced with panic and despair, humour and resilience. Alison, who wrote the play herself, allows each character to evolve in individual short segments, ultimately weaving a delicate plot that brings them together into a single, shared universe.
As an actress, Alison has a wonderfully expressive face, and she is beautiful to watch as she makes the transition from one character to another, adopting a new accent, attitude and appearance for each. Everything is accomplished with little more than a chair and a few accessories. If there was a fault to find with the performance it was that the characters occasionally rambled just that minute too long and that the production itself could have used more polish and verve, particularly in terms of the lighting.
Funds raised by this production of ‘Are There More of You?’ staged in collaboration with the British Council, will go towards the work of the Sunera Foundation in Sri Lanka.