Singular Women

Synopsis

Singular Women focuses on the extraordinary stories of four separate characters. Bea is publicising a book about her late lover, a well-known comedian; Stella believes that what she does not know about chocolate is not worth knowing; isolated spinster Frances innocently plays with dolls houses whilst hiding a guilty secret; and Dora is a 'perfectly formed small person whose acting career is jeopardised during a run of Humpty Dumpty. The women are united by an underlying sense of loneliness, and the four monologues contain equal measures of comedy and pathos as the characters struggle to keep up impressions of contentment with their lives

Our Review:

29 September 2003

Earlier this year, Stewart Permutt had a hit at the King's Head with a solo monologue for one woman, Unsuspecting Susan performed by Celia Imrie, but this revival (at the same address) of the plural monologues of his earlier Singular Women, first staged on the Edinburgh Fringe in 1991, reveals a playwright still grappling with reconciling the tensions between form and content.

Permutt has a vivid way of compressing a tidy amount of character information in a short time span, and these four little comic vignettes do come to variously touching life. But there's also an inevitable predictability to the way they unfold as a secret, big or small, is gradually revealed. With four characters conveyed in the same playing time that it took Permutt to animate just one in the other play, there's also inevitably less development to each.

That said, however, Singular Women is definitely worth seeing for the supre...

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Latest User Review

USER: Whatsonstage.com (193.111.25.19) - 24 October 2003:

I thoroughly enjoyed this. Lovely small intimate theatre. Lesley Joseph was superb, I loved the different characters. Excellent....

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