REVIEW: HEDGEHOG by Alexander Knott at Lion & Unicorn Theatre 15 - 22 June

David Weir • Jun 15, 2019
‘uplifting, inventive theatrical experience’ ★★★★

A play that advertises itself as a one-woman show with themes of anxiety, panic attacks and depression might look a little too truthful for its box office good. But Hedgehog is precisely that and also an entirely uplifting, inventive theatrical experience.

Manda, a midlands teenager, suffers the full horror of adolescent life – the embarrassment of parents and the pain of their break-up; the discovery that your ‘best friend’ barely cares who you are; the endless attempts to persuade yourself you’re having fun on a night out you know you’ll remember with dread. But she’s an engagingly written character played with huge zest by Zoe Grain, carrying 70 minutes of rapid-fire, often very funny dialogue without apparent effort as she switches from comic enthusiasm to real pain. In particular, she captures the awfulness of teenage belief in microcosmic disaster, such as the night you wore an unfashionable jacket that seems so embarrassing your life has pretty much ended. 

It’s a show on which absolutely no expense whatsoever has been spared – bare stage, a few costume props and an AV projector. But that absence of glitz is more than compensated for by the sheer invention of the piece. Manda is not, after all, alone, and though Grain has 98 per cent of the dialogue, Emily Costello and Lucy Annable play ‘Them’, the other people in Manda’s life in (for reasons not entirely obvious) 1997 to 1999.

Though largely silent, they’re directed beautifully to perform dance, mime and even a spot of excellent puppetry representing a small boy carrying the hedgehog of the title and the range of their expressions, movement near-perfect choreography and comic timing raise what might otherwise be a fairly run-of-the-mill coming-of-age story well above the average.

The underlying depression theme is lightly handled, with Manda happily emerging by the end from her darkness; perhaps a harder-edged production would seem to explore the theme more deeply, but the warmth of this one leaves you thinking about the individuality of painful experience as well as remembering the funny bit with the Spice Girls.

There’s real talent on and off stage here, and as the Lion and Unicorn returns to pub theatre, shows of this quality should help put it back on the map.

HEDGEHOG by Alexander Knott
Directed by Georgia Richardson
Presented by Boxless Theatre
Lion and Unicorn 15 June to 22 June 2019

Reviewer David Weir’s plays include Confessional (Oran Mor, Glasgow), published at www.Spotlightpublications.com, and Better Together (Jack Studio, Brockley, London), Winner of the Write Now Festival Prize. He has also won SCDA, Kenneth Branagh and Constance Cox awards, and twice been longlisted for the Bruntwood Prize. 


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