Build A Rocket. Wonderville.

It is the night before high school GCSEs kick off. Instead of revising, gusty sixteen year-old Yasmin is on a booze-fuelled visit to the tackiest club in Scarborough. Soon abandoned by her mates, she falls into the clutches of sleazy-but-dumb local DJ Danny. As day follows night, she flunks the exams and falls pregnant. “You don’t need qualifications to be in love” she muses optimistically, but dishonourable Danny has a roving eye and decides Yasmin’s devious mate Sarah is a better catch. Ghosted by the DJ, too scared to have an abortion, and hopelessly unsupported by an alcoholic mother, Yasmin finds herself a single mother with “no qualifications, no future and no hope”. She struggles to hang on to a job as a cleaner and social services soon take an interest in the baby’s welfare. Will Yasmin overcome the pressures of teen motherhood? Equally important, will quirky son Jack survive nits and a label of ‘challenging behaviour’ to grow up with better chances in life than his unfortunate mother?

The storyline to Christopher York’s one-woman comedy drama Build a Rocket, which had broadly well-received runs at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2018 and 2019, deals with exceptionally familiar tropes. Indeed, the tale of a single mother struggling to survive against the backdrop of entrenched urban deprivation has a lineage stretching through Mike Leigh movies right back to Shelagh Delaney’s late ‘50s masterpiece A Taste Of Honey. York manages a decent stab at the subject, even if it feels like the writer is little too comfortable with stock characters from the kitchen sink cabinet. An occasional foray into rap and rhyming verse do not add a huge amount new to the mix here.

What saves Build a Rocket from goodhearted indifference is a tremendously nuanced performance by Shannon Rewcroft as the unhappy Yasmin. With exceptional skill, the Scarborough-originating actor tracks the girl’s journey from gauche, mouthy teen, to friendless frazzled young mum, to determined, no-prisoners-taken family matriarch. You may not necessarily believe in Yasmin as a fleshed-out character (she is too much of a stereotype for that), but such is Rewcroft’s charm you will probably root for the benighted girl anyway.

Director Jordan Langford chooses to have Rewcroft deliver much of the narrative cabaret-style, with the actor wondering in and amongst spectators, occasionally landing on an audience member for some faintly forced interaction. It is a style that adds urgency and momentum to the 65-minute show, but one that occasionally feels a little at odds with the grimy, disadvantaged zeitgeist of the show’s central theme.

Writer: Christopher York

Director: Jordan Langford