GIRL OUT OF THE BLUE
Tabard Theatre
★★
“ultimately, we are left with the feeling that the play itself has yet to find its own identity”
Giles Cole’s “Girl Out of the Blue” opens with a seventeen-year-old girl meeting a fifty-something man in a bar. She is there under false pretences. He, a journalist, thinks she has a story about domestic abuse to offer him. She has another agenda entirely. When she drops the bombshell that she thinks she is his daughter, his reaction is complex. We know it is coming (it’s in the first line of the poster copy), but he also betrays a certain prior knowledge, despite claiming that the news is ‘out of the blue’. The episode sets the tone of the piece. The secrets revealed are (secretly) common knowledge already.
Except for Abi (Miranda Braun) perhaps, who is entering adulthood having been brought up by her overbearing single mother Beth (Sarah Berger). Understandably she wants to discover her biological father. Less understandably, she finds a phone number in an old address book of her mother’s and immediately assumes she has the answer. Doug (Jonathan Sidgwick) – for it is he who is the alleged father – pretends not to have known about his daughter. His wife Maya (Seeta Indrani) also feigns outrage at the discovery, although that is also a pretence. Abi’s mother starts out claiming that Doug never knew – but that, too, is a lie. Oh, what tangled webs we weave.
The layers are peeled back like an adult ‘pass the parcel’. Each short scene is punctuated by William Godfree’s light piano melodies. When the music stops, we have the next unveiling. But the anticipation and the tension are lacking and the heightened emotions the characters are aiming for are beyond reach and consequently unbelievable. The intention is there but the delivery is inconsistent. The most convincing is the mother and daughter relationship. Braun and Berger spar well and make up better, a mutual tenderness visible beneath the arguments. There is little affection, however, between Doug and Maya. Sidgwick’s loveable rogue might have the audience on his side, but his wife is having none of it. Indrani’s ice-queen is unwavering, yet equally unconvincing and locked into one rigid pose. Unfortunately, many of her lines are lost, too, through poor projection.
Cole’s writing hovers between sitcom and soap, circling each other without really getting to the heart of the matter. Jonas Cemm’s static direction accentuates this lack of conviction. The questions are raised but then left suspended and we become rather baffled, while we are never granted full access to the characters’ beliefs and emotions. Histrionic outbursts are seldom more than lines on a page. The humour, however, is a saving grace, of which Berger is adept at dishing out with a wry, slightly tipsy, twinkle in her eye. Braun, too, has fun taunting the adults and mocking the perversity of ‘grown-up’ moral standards. Sidgwick has his work cut out as the only male running the gauntlet of feminine antipathy. We can definitely see the potential for more comedy without sacrificing the importance and complexity of its key topics.
There is something intrinsically and dramatically powerful in the revelation of secrets that are already known. The angst of the build-up to confession, followed by the twist that the confidante is one step ahead. “Girl Out of the Blue” ironically tries to build on this concept. She is not out of the blue at all. Similarly, though, the play itself has little that is unforeseen or unexpected in its narrative structure. A late insertion concerning an alleged historical harassment case is touched upon, but its impact is subdued. The deliberately mundane and anticlimactic ending is refreshing by contrast, and a nice closure to the emotional upheavals of these four characters in search of answers and identity. But ultimately, we are left with the feeling that the play itself has yet to find its own identity.
GIRL OUT OF THE BLUE
Tabard Theatre
Reviewed on 25th September 2026
by Jonathan Evans
Photography by Bethany Blake
