One Year Itch. Barons Court Theatre.

Tania is horny as hell but has still just bailed from a blind date on the pretence that her father is sick. The unlucky girl was “just fine”, Tania explains to long-suffering straight flatmate Jayne. But “I ordered a Piña Collada and she ordered tap water” so the die was cast.  Besides, she adds as if to add insult to injury, “I waxed all over and she didn’t even floss”.  There are some genuinely funny lines in One Year Itch, writer and director Andrew Phipps’ comic tale of Tania’s long, long year of living without sex. One just wishes there were a few more of them.

It is not that Tania (a steely and believable Anca Vaida) is not trying. She spends much of the show’s 75 minutes on a series of a dates from hell. It is just that, rather like a lesbian Price Of Denmark, she simply cannot make up her mind what she wants. Is it the Tinder-fuelled random hook-ups in Moroccan-themed hotels that she craves, but never quite manages to go through with? Does she thirst for the commitment of a full-on love affair, even though her heart is still broken from a failed tryst with two-timing ex Gillian (a suitably snarling Kelly Craige)? Or should she eschew sex entirely and focus on her career and long desired promotion?

The protagonist’s chronic indecisiveness becomes a curse from which she struggles break free. One supposes Phipp’s slightly pessimistic point here is that Tania’s (a cipher for the wider LGBTQ+ community) yearning to have everything in life, right here and right now, means she (and we) are doomed to miss many of the things actually worth having.

One Year Itch’s cast of nine is, aside from some clever funky disco-themed scene transitions, woefully underused. The glorious Jean Woollard, fresh (as many of the other cast members are) from the Almedia’s tremendous 24 (Day): The Measure of My Dreams, delivers a divine cameo as the country-bumpkin mum of posh, egotistical ‘It Girl’ Tilly (Buddleia Maslen). Bedecked in a blood-red kimono and delivering decidedly near-the-knuckle jokes, she is the parent in law of fever dreams.

One wishes we saw more of Wollard and that goes for the rest of the performers, particularly Jhané Gibson as Louisa, a twenty-something determined to move on from her male ex with some same-sex experimentation with a wary Tania. Susan Hoffman shines too in a very brief vignette as the anally retentive bondage mistress Freya, as does Ozzy Algar as the sleekly seductive movie-star Vitoria De Luca. The fantastic Iona McTaggart is underused as Jayne.

Phipp could learn a trick from his protagonist in One Year Itch. Slow down a little and focus on the people that matter.

Writer and Director:  Andrew Phipps

Reviewer: John Cutler