L.A.BABY
Riverside Studios
★★★★★
“reporting from inside the American Dream by someone who got out”
There are two kinds of Brits who come home from Los Angeles: the ones who talk about the light, and the ones who talk about the traffic. Ambrosine Davies has written a third account that’s a lot more accurate. L.A. Baby, her solo hour at Riverside Studios as part of the Bitesize Festival, compresses nine years in So. Cal. into sixty minutes. For audience members who are themselves L.A. returnees, this is twenty-five years of therapy delivered in an hour.
Davies eschews both the Los Angeles of the postcard and the version usually portrayed in British comedy. Instead, she presents the city of the relentless audition, the diner shift lost over an order of eggs benedict, of the nannying job for a family in the midst of narcissistic divorce shenanigans. Davies lived it. Anyone in the audience who has loved and resented a place in equal measure will relive every beat with her.
Davies writes and performs, with Eduardo Barreto directing. The entire hour runs on a single governing instinct: let the audience laugh first, then take the floor away. The opening stretch is very funny, assembled from the small humiliations of the working actor: the auditions requiring a smaller version of yourself, the jobs taken to fund the jobs you actually want. Davies is a precise mimic. The Californian voices she conjures, the agents, the employers, the casting assistants, are recognisable people rather than accents. She resists the easy contempt a British audience would have lapped up.
The turn, when it arrives, is not signposted. The boyfriend situation shifts from difficult to abusive to mortally dangerous in the usually incremental fashion. The room is still laughing when Davies reaches the point of being stalked, receiving death threats and calculating whether to carry a gun on the school run. It’s a real achievement not to change the show’s genre halfway through. The comedy becomes the mechanism by which the horror is delivered.
The staging is deliberately spare, which suits a piece that has travelled from Edinburgh. Storytelling carries the weight. Lighting and sound (by Eliska Van Lelyveld) unobtrusively but effectively mark the border between funny and frightening. The glow of flashing police lights forces our heroine out of her self-delusion that everything is ok.
The compression is the only cost. Nine years into sixty minutes means the early Los Angeles material gets room to breathe while the events that actually drove Davies home arrive at a run. A longer version of this show is surely waiting in the wings. It would be a harder watch.
L.A. Baby is billed as dark comedy, which undersells it considerably. It is reporting from inside the American Dream by someone who got out. It’s impossible to look away.
L.A.BABY
Riverside Studios
Reviewed on 25th August 2026
by Elizabeth Botsford
Photography by Angela Milton
