Tag Archives: Rachel Causer

Please Feel Free to Share

Please, Feel Free to Share

★★★★

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

PLEASE, FEEL FREE TO SHARE  at Edinburgh Festival Fringe

★★★★

 

Please Feel Free to Share

 

“Róisín Bevan commands the stage right from the start”

 

Please, Feel Free to Share is Rachel Causer’s latest script — a one woman show about social media, addiction to group therapy, and compulsive lying. If this sounds downbeat, heavy stuff, it’s not. It’s a funny, insightful look into how easy it is to become hooked on the things that don’t matter, while ignoring the things (and people) that do. Playing at the intimate Attic space at the Pleasance Courtyard, Please, Feel Free to Share is sixty minutes of watching the outwardly successful Alex (played by Róisín Bevan) take apart her self sabotaging strategies at work, and in her personal life. It’s often hilarious, and oddly heartwarming.

Causer’s plays often feature wry observations about the work world. She sees things we either miss, or fail to take as seriously as we should, as we go about our busy lives. Causer also sees how our professional lives bleed into our personal lives in ways that can injure both. In Please, Feel Free to Share, Alex’s life begins to spiral out of control as she adapts successful social media strategies at work for managing her personal life. But adapting a professional strategy designed for advertising purposes — to promote a product — somehow doesn’t seem quite right when the “product” is you. Causer strips away the false importance of maintaining a social media presence for what it is: a way of plastering over shortcomings that would be obvious if we didn’t spend so much time covering them up. As a successful social media consultant, Alex racks up the new Instagram followers at work, while posting pictures to boost a carefully tailored online personal profile. In the meantime, she hasn’t taken the time to grieve the loss of her father, and she keeps getting messages about her estranged mother from a hospital she doesn’t call back. Finally her boss suggests she takes some time off, and suggests a group therapy session to help with grieving. Alex takes her boss’ advice—and her carefully curated life starts to unravel. Desperate to find approval any way that she can, Alex builds a completely false story around the recent death of her father at the group therapy session. And once she starts lying, of course she can’t stop.

Please, Feel Free to Share is a timely play, and performer Róisín Bevan commands the stage right from the start. Dressed in eye-catching pink and orange, and in a small space decorated only with matching chairs, she takes immediate charge of the performance space, and the audience. Bevan begins by showing exactly how convincingly Alex can lie. Then in a breathtaking switcheroo, Bevan exposes Alex the liar. And having established that Alex is an unreliable narrator, and is in many ways, quite an unlikeable character, Bevan, as Alex, still manages to maintain the audience’s sympathy. This is very competent work, and does Causer’s script credit. Please, Feel Free to Share also confirms that Rachel Causer is a playwright to watch. Recommended.

 

Reviewed 5th August 2022

by Dominica Plummer

 

Photography courtesy Chloe Nelkin Consulting

 

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When it Happens

★★★★★

Tristan Bates Theatre

When it Happens

When it Happens

Tristan Bates Theatre

Reviewed – 30th July 2019

★★★★★

 

“a manic tour de force performed by a hugely talented cast”

 

Scatterjam Theatre’s When It Happens by Rachel Causer, is part of the 2019 Camden Fringe Festival. This delightful three hander, performed by powerhouse actresses, turns on the idea that each woman is going about her daily activities until, at 2.16 pm, she experiences a transformation that utterly changes the world as she sees it, and, just as importantly, as the world sees her.

The small, intimate space at the Tristan Bates Theatre is precisely the right venue for Rachel Causer’s play. With a bare bones performance space that sketches an area bound by chairs on three sides, and two microphones at points of entry and exit, the audience is free to focus on the acting. And it’s the acting (ably directed by Kennedy Bloomer) which provides everything from portrayals of character to sound effects, lighting effects, props and music. This play is a manic tour de force performed by a hugely talented cast that is fifty five minutes or so of time well spent.

When It Happens begins quietly enough as we are introduced to Freya (Niamh Watson) who skitters on stage with some mysterious stains that look like blood on her white hoodie; Jenny (played by playwright Causer), in a work smart red blouse and a I-can-do-this grin, and Beth (Roisin Bevan), in a black shirt with a white towel draped over her shoulders. The towel turns out to have an important role to play as well. As each character begins to narrate her experience of what happens at 2.16 pm precisely, the other two swing into action as eager listeners but also supplying other characters as the stories proceed. Bevan is particularly good with her body language when called upon to portray the creepy male colleague that Jenny has to deal with, but it is a pleasure to watch all three at work.

The script itself is totally brilliant and confounds expectations. Each time that Causer introduces an overly familiar trope (for example, three women trapped in an anonymous dark space; three archetypes of women as virgin, madonna and whore) she transforms these into something utterly unexpected. The writing is by turns anarchic, explosive, but, by the end of the piece, empowering, and yes, fun. There are a wealth of memorable one liners that had the audience in stitches, and full of appreciative applause at the end of the show.

I strongly recommend that you book your ticket and rush to get your own theatrical epiphany while you still can.

 

Reviewed by Dominica Plummer

Photography by Lexi Clare

 

Camden Fringe

When it Happens

Tristan Bates Theatre until 3rd August as part of Camden Fringe 2019

 

Last ten shows reviewed at this venue:
Me & My Left Ball | ★★★★ | January 2019
Nuns | ★★★ | January 2019
Classified | ★★★½ | March 2019
Oranges & Ink | ★★ | March 2019
Mortgage | ★★★ | April 2019
Sad About The Cows | ★★ | May 2019
The Luncheon | ★★★ | June 2019
To Drone In The Rain | ★★ | June 2019
Sorry Did I Wake You | ★★★★ | July 2019
The Incident Pit | ★½ | July 2019

 

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