Now That She’s Gone

Now That She’s Gone is the story of the relationship between Ellen Snortland, an attention seeking performer and her mother, a Norwegian who repeatedly tells her daughter that she “would rather have had sons”.

Fortunately, the audience participation segment of this one-woman show is brief and over with at the start. Ellen is at her mother’s deathbed and tells the history of their relationship through flashbacks which jump around a lot with the effect that the story becomes a little disjointed. Recollections of thoughts and events in Ellen’s childhood seem too precocious to be true but are not ridiculous enough to be surreal, and the monologue is slightly amusing in parts without being laugh-out-loud hilarious.

Although Ellen’s mother sounds like a right old battleaxe, it is difficult to sympathise with Ellen after she bursts into a medley of South Pacific songs in an attempt to demonstrate how talented she is and therefore that her mother should have considered herself blessed to have produced such a wonderful child. Unfortunately, I sided with her mother.

– Kendal Spark