REVIEW: THE VEGAN TIGRESS by Claire Parker at Bread and Roses Theatre until 1 Mar 2025

‘original, funny and touching’ ★★★★

Writers write for many reasons – some to say what must be said, some to scrape a living, some in pursuit of fortune and fame. All, though, at some point hope that the fact of their published or performed work is a scratch on the surface of time, a small glimmer of immortality. Mary de Morgan, obscure to us now, a minor literary figure even in her own mid-to-late 19th century, is restored to life at Clapham in Claire Parker’s The Vegan Tigress.

She’s a Mary quite contrary who has managed, by outspoken opinion and absence of tact, to alienate her circle (much of the pre-Raphaelite movement and George Bernard Shaw among them) and lose her fiance. Surrounded only by piles of books, she toils alone in her tiny garret to write the fairy stories that remain her near-forgotten legacy to the world.

But her loneliness will be disturbed. She’s also interested in the spiritual world and manages to conjure from the vasty deep, perhaps the last companion she’d have wanted in the shape of Lady Tuttle (Edie Campbell), the corseted, conventional and recently deceased Victorian matriarch who’d have been her mother-in-law if life had taken a different turn.

Lady Tuttle’s spirit is not blithe: haughty, self-satisfied and with that peculiarly English capacity to wield politness as a deadly weapon, she berates Mary’s poverty, dowdiness and literary pretensions as the pair settle to an eternity of sparring until they come to appreciate in their loneliness that more unites than differentiates them as women in a thoroughly masculine society.

Parker (who also plays Mary) has written an original, funny and touching work which weaves one of Mary’s fairy stories into the sniping between the fading literary figure and the ghost.

If de Morgan herself wrote unconventional fairy stories (happy endings optional, honest poverty more to be prized than pots of gold), Parker follows suit in introducing not only a ghost but transitioning smoothly into dramatising the Vegan Tigress, an almost psychedelic tale about a queen whose lost hair is recovered with the help of a Tiger who can’t eat flesh. Care has also been taken with costume, set design, lighting and sound in creating Mary’s shrunken physical world and limitless imaginary one.

THE VEGAN TIGRESS by Claire Parker at Bread and Roses Theatre 18 February – 1 March 2025

Director: Tracy Collier 

Presented by: Lynchpin Theatre

At Bread and Roses Theatre, Clapham   

Box Office: https://app.lineupnow.com/event/the-vegan-tigress

Reviewer David Weir’s plays include Confessional (Oran Mor, Glasgow), Better Together (Jack Studio, London). Those and others performed across Scotland, Wales and England, and in Australia, Canada, South Korea, Switzerland and Belgium. Awards include Write Now Festival prize, Constance Cox award, SCDA best depiction of Scottish life, and twice Bruntwood longlisted.