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Eleanor Appleton: Why You Should Come & See ... Rosie Thorn, Butter Would Not Melt

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Rosie Thorn is the perfect housewives, but she has a few dark secrets. Eleanor Appleton, writer of the show, talks about the creation of Rosie and performing the character in Butter Would Not Melt.

Mrs. Rosie Thorn is a beacon of domestic perfection, a mascot if you will for good honest clean living all the other members of the village look up to her as a leader of sorts. They admire her buffed nobs and extremely moist Victoria Sponge Cake but they do not know what Rosie is using to fertilize her exquisitely pruned rose garden.

The dark, twisted and hilarious tale of Rosie Thorn, Butter Would Not Melt is my debut one-woman comedy show. The character of Rosie Thorn has been evolving over the past five years since she first appeared at Edinburgh Fringe Festival as part of the show ‘The Powder Room’. Since then I have used Rosie as a cabaret compere on the London cabaret circuit, however this is the first play that follows Rosie’s sadistic antics from start to finish.

Rosie has evolved over the years; she started as a high-pitched squeaky voiced seemingly innocent intruder in another world in The Powder Room in 2006. Since then her evolution has been substantial from a psychotic girly girl with a powder white face and drag make-up to a psychotic mass murdering 50’s housewife, you’ll notice psychotic is the only constant.

I have never been a fan of happy ending that tie all loose ends up in one big pretty bow, the Hollywood blockbuster formula didn’t work for me and Rosie Thorn, Butter Would Not Melt is very dark in parts, funny all the way through and the ending is open to interpretation which I love, no happy ending here. Rosie as a character encapsulates my fascination with the façade of beauty and perfection; wherever there seems to be perfection there is a rotten underbelly teaming with unsavoury things. Rosie is riddled with many layers from her perfect housewife facade with her deeply affected upper middle class diction to her severely psychotic plotting and scheming and deluded opinion of herself.

Worryingly after 5 years I can easily slip into the character and I feel so comfortable in her that I can ad lib and play with the audience. I think that comes with the time that I have spent playing her she really has become a 3 dimensional living breathing character. Obviously it also helps that I have written the play and many other scripts for her, the more I do the easier it becomes.

I hope that the characters profile will be raised during and after this festival and I will then be able to bring further chapters in the uncontrolled and manic life of Rosie to stages in the future.

Rosie Thorn, Butter Would Not Melt is on at theSpaces @ Surgeons Hall from 5-27 August (excl 21). Times vary.

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