REVIEW: SPIN CYCLE by Zofia Zerphy, part of SEFest at Bridge House Theatre 2025

“queer rom com mystery will keep you guessing.” ★★★ ½

Set to a cool soundtrack, we’re in a laundrette with two glowing machines centre stage. All manner of smalls are festooned around, spectral and fluttering, all light coloured, white and beige. Kitt, pretty, confident, and American, knows everything about the laundrette, like how to deal with sticky washing machine doors and takes it upon herself to help Kitt, a spiky haired brash Irish artist with odd socks, and a wired energy.

Before you know it, these two are connecting over an errant thong: flirting, divulging, revealing, and what starts as a straightforward lesbians-in-a-laundrette-romcom slides into something stranger, more mysterious and compelling. Do these two know each other? Were they involved once? How come Noel already knows things about Kitt including her name?  And why does Kitt seem to suffer from kind of sequential amnesia?

“What will you do with your fifty minutes?” asks Kitt, engagingly performed by Zofia Zerphy who also wrote the piece. Fifty minutes is the length of the wash cycle – and 55 minutes is the length of Spin Cycle. While the conversation starts cute and kooky, discussing art practice, they are soon sharing stories of their pasts and former relationships, getting closer, touching.

While Kitt is from a privileged background, living on an inheritance (which does beg the question why doesn’t she own a washing machine?) Noel, performed by Rhiannon Bell is working class and was disowned by her family when she came out. She’s full of righteous anger and an aching heart. These two couldn’t be more different yet they seem to be magnetically drawn to one another.

There are no clear-cut answers in Spin Cycle, but lots of ambiguity to keep an audience thinking and questioning. Is it a dramatic analogy about how different people deal with memory and traumatic past events? For some, colours fade, for others, they slip into the whites and turn everything pink. Is this laundrette in another dimension?  Or is it some kind of existential purgatory where grief and loss, can be washed away - or relived in an endless cycle of pain?

With fresh, contemporary direction by Bethan Rose, Spin Cycle, part of SE Fest is bought to you by Berserk Theatre (An Average Family; How to Urn a Living) a company that spotlight queer international voices. It turns out, you can cover quite a lot of ground in fifty minutes.

Spin Cycle, Part of SE Fest 2025 at Bridge House Theatre and Jack Studio Theatre

Producing Company: Berserk Theatre, run by Zofia Zerphy

Writer: Zofia Zerphy

Director: Bethan Rose

KITT: Zofia Zerphy

NOEL: Rhiannon Bell

Technician: Corvus René

Photography: either Niamh Cunningham or Bethan Rose