Ugly Lovely (Old Red Lion)
The protagonist in Ffion Jones' debut play is about an all-drinking, all-swearing young mother. She's stuck in Swansea, feeling angry and hopeless and she's bored with the endless casual sex and binge drinking. When her nan, the only person in the world she could talk to, dies, she can't let go. Literally and metaphorically: she carries around her ashes in a funeral urn wherever she goes.
Ugly Lovely is an attempt to show the darker side of the lives of young people in the city. It's got a fiery Welsh energy and wit which comes through in the early scenes, where Shell begins to ask whether she's really having that much fun. Shell and her bonkers friend Tash bounce off each other like soul mates, but the emptiness in Shell's life becomes increasingly clear: her son doesn't live with her and her boyfriend 'is like a ghost'. His stuff is left all over her flat, but he never materialises.
It's ultimately a kind of gritty take on a coming of age tale where Shell begins to see the world she has known all her life through a different lens. She toys with the idea of going to Liverpool, she hooks up with a boy she fancied at school, but everything seems to stay the same. When she discovers she's gone into town for a large one wearing the same dress she wore on a similar night ten years ago, she flips.
There are some very funny moments in the piece, and, to begin with, Jones's dialogue is snappy and smart. But Ugly Lovely loses its way pretty quickly, relying on the portrayals of up-for-anything Swansea girls (Jones as Shell and Sophie Hughes as Tash) to keep momentum up. The two are good performers and manage to bring humour and heart to roles that are slight.
As Shell's life stagnates, so does the plot, which moves at a snail's pace and lingers too much on moments of caricature. Shell and Tash get completely hammered on what is supposed to be their last night together before Shell leaves for Liverpool. It gets a little staid watching them legless as they gabble, stagger and puke. It's an unnecessarily drawn out meltdown in the toilets.
Lizzy Leech's initial design is a grimy, grotty kebab shop with dirty tiled floors, it works in this context, but things are quickly rearranged into a flat and then a nightclub toilet but the set doesn't lend itself to being more than one thing. It just feels like a shortcut. In its best moments, Ugly Lovely feels like it could become a good TV sitcom, but though there are flashes of promise here there just aren't enough.
Ugly Lovely runs at the Old Red Lion until 16 July.
