REVIEW: FOLLOW THE LINES at Bread & Roses Theatre 21- 25 March 2023

‘A committed drama that unfortunately hits a few bumps in the road’

Drugs, denial, dating, good trips turning bad, ‘Follow the Lines’ tackles relatable topics from the ground up with a strong main character, but can’t quite overcome some growing pains. Ultimately the audience is left with a committed drama that unfortunately hits a few bumps in the road.

This one-woman play opens with 30-something Chloe (Rebecca Pryle) starting on a wild Friday night of cocaine-fueled hedonism, seemingly all fun and games while an important morning deadline to discuss her script with a theatre official looms over her. Throwing caution to the wind inevitably ends with Chloe missing her chance, and the proceeding ups and downs in her dating and family life eventually culminate in a bad night at a club that leads us to an intense closing scene with Chloe barring all to a silent therapist.

Throughout all this the intelligent and inventive lighting perfectly establishes mood, while the minimal props are used to great effect by Pryle. The two scenes I highlighted above, the opening party and the closing therapy session, are by far the best in the play and showcase every one of its strengths. At the party Chloe’s overly-enthusiastic dance moves are endearing, her lines are endlessly quippy and the whole stage glows in time to the beat. In the therapy scene, the lighting is stark and the whole stage eerily still as Chloe slowly opens up and confronts herself in the most impressive piece of acting of the night.

However, at many other points in the play something ends up feeling off. While certainly nailing her main character Pryle does also have to carry the rest of the script’s cast on her shoulders, in the process doing a great job with some (such as party fiend Liam) but failing to breath life into others, and many are left feeling like caricatures rather than characters. At times the tone also seems off, most notably in the scene where Chloe has her meeting with the theatre official, whose voice comes through the speakers above. As the interrogation of her script’s evasive main character becomes increasingly personally wounding to Chloe the official’s voice distorts, subtly at first but then quite excessively, eventually sounding so demonic that some audience members were giggling as the scene reached its climax and Chloe collapsed into a panic attack.

The script itself also contains a few flubs, most strikingly during the climatic moment of the play. Here Chloe finally gives voice to the anger and hate behind the anxiety that has dogged and undermined her throughout the play and the intensity of the moment builds and builds as she vehemently calls out all she hates in this world, about to provide a wonderful close to the play as a whole, until the moment she decries that Jews are denied a role in the general fight against racism. This is a hefty statement, one that could easily constitute a whole play of its own, but precisely because it’s so hefty it feels completely incongruous; this has not been shown to be a facet of Chloe’s character at all up to this point and only serves to jar the viewer out of the play’s most important moment.

At the end of the day, Follow the Lines has a lot to say on important issues and delivers an endearing character at its core, but needs some further tinkering before it can reliably express what it wants to say.

REVIEW: Follow the Lines at Bread & Roses Theatre,

21st March – 25th March 2023

Box office: https://www.breadandrosestheatre.co.uk/

Written by Olivia Pryle

Performed by Rebecca Pryle

Directed by Velenzia Spearpoint

Reviewed by Harry Conway