23 August 2022
Consider for a moment the components from which Ruby Shrimpton has engineered her touching, warm, and funny one-woman show, Unstitching. In no discernible order she offers up contemplations on the history and meaning (or lack thereof) of the Eurovision Song Contest; Tik-Tok style sing-along dance tributes to some of the contest’s greatest songs; and painful poetic reflections on the challenges of finding sense in one’s own performance, delivered in third person rhyming couplets. Add in a dash of stand-up comedy that aches with existential angst, oh, and an unravelling crochet stage outfit. It is the kind of mishmash that has the potential to go spectacularly wrong. In lesser hands than those of writer, actor, and theatre-maker Shrimpton, it very well might. Thankfully, the talented Liverpool-based writer has pulled off something rather fine here.
Shrimpton tells us that the reason she loves the camp theatricality of Eurovision is because it is “fun without meaning,” and because any attempt to find significance in its bizarre mixture of tinkling ballads, ballsy rock and random electropop is ultimately doomed to failure. In a sense, Unstitching is the antithesis of Eurovision. It is about one performer’s floundering attempts to find meaning in the flow of disparate and contradictory ideas that she wants and needs to communicate to an audience.
At times in the show there is a metatheatrical feel of listening in, real-time, to the thoughts and self-doubts that occupy this writer’s head as she devises the very piece we are watching. Sitting on her sofa she tells us she is “typing out these rambles, in the hopes of stringing them together into something that makes sense.” But despite the character’s best attempts to find something to say, and to communicate it in a way that is authentic and true, she finds herself literally unravelling on stage.
Unstitching is sometimes puzzling in its unpredictable shifts between song, poetry, and comedy, and between first and third-person speech. But however baffling and bonkers it can seem, the 45-minute show is seldom less than engaging, a fact aided by Shrimpton’s consummate skills as a comedy performer. The show would struggle to work in a much longer time slot than it enjoys, but it is definitely worth a look.
Duration: 45 minutes
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