REVIEW: Dolls and Guys at Bridge House Theatre 10 – 14 October 2023

‘It’s a neat idea but it doesn’t have the legs for a play’ ★★ ½

Sabean Bea and Alanna Flynn have written a little treatise on the commodification of women, and their forced position in a marketplace that only values a narrow range of ‘desirable’ characteristics, one of which is that you mustn’t get old. It’s a neat idea, it gets a forceful design boost with a set consisting of a shop window and a series of price points – the more desirable the woman, the higher her price – and it gets the idea across really quickly.

Theatre is built around mimesis and metaphor, and this metaphor is neatly embodied, clearly presented, and then hammered into the ground. This is a sketch, quite a good sketch, that would be fine in a sketch show. It really doesn’t have the legs for a play, even a one-hour play.

There is chat between the women as they wait to be rented – no-one gets purchased for keeps, one of the show’s neater metaphors – and a degree of characterisation, but it really isn’t until the end that any of the dialogue reveals much. The last ten minutes show the potential of the piece. Dorothea Jones and Sabean Bea (she acts AND writes AND designs set and sound) talk and reveal genuine feelings and develop character, and that might have been a better play. It certainly didn’t reveal all its secrets in the first five minutes. It was nicely played. It presented jokes and dreams and fears, and at the end we knew the characters, valued the characters, liked the characters. For forty-five minutes, they were merely illustrations of an idea. For ten minutes they were interesting.

Dolls and Guys at Bridge House Theatre 10 – 14 October 2023

Director

JULIA SUDZINSKY

Writer

SABEAN BEA & ALANNA FLYNN

Choreographer

JULIA SUDZINSKY

Designer

SABEAN BEA

Sound Designer

SABEAN BEA

Reviewed by Chris Lilly