One Life Stand

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One Life Stand is an execrable thing. It’s rare that a show in Edinburgh makes me angry. Because it takes so much guts to do this here and there is so much on the line. But this show still managed. Here’s why.

It’s by Middle Child, who made All We Ever Wanted Was Everything and while gig-theatre is admittedly not my thing that show was, well, it was gig-theatre at its finest.

This is… I don’t know what this is. It’s incomprehensible for one thing: I had so little idea what anyone was saying at most points that I was really unclear as to the plot or the characters and everyone kept speak-singing but at the same time so you just got a headache and then occasionally the libretto would come through and you’d realise it was just as naff as you expected only naffer.

It’s about Kit and Kat and Momo (god knows why) and Kit and Kat are in a flailing relationship and Momo is the fifteen year-old girl who Kit’s attentions settle on while Kat sleeps with a sexy man she doesn’t like in a hotel room. [Oh, I did get the plot!]

I suppose there are things of interest – its slew of four-star reviews from eminent places  suggest that it is about modern lives on the internet, about alienation and disconnection and dating apps. But the only bit of this I understood in the show was this incredibly frustrating motif where Kit would send cat gifs to Kat and we were also supposed to laugh wryly but I felt mortified and completely sick because nowhere on EARTH APART FROM HELLISH THEATRELAND IS THAT A JOKE THAT MAKES ANY SENSE AND EVEN THERE IT IS NOT FUNNY IT IS VOMIT-INDUCING.

I’m being rude about the show because really its inexcusable quality – and the reason I’m writing about it at all – is because of its deeply unpleasant attitude to its protagonist and his relationship with the fifteen year-old Momo.

She is fifteen. She is a child. This show fails to realise that.

It seems to take a blurring of lines as an invitation to dodge any requirement to answer the difficulties it has made for itself – as though the plot does not betray a politics and as though putting a grown man onstage, drunk and talking about how much he wants to put his hands all over a child were just some twee plot-point and not requiring of censure: but the bloke is the hero of the show. He has the most stage-time, he has the most control on the plot, he has the biggest “arc” [not as big as it should have been, he should have been put in prison] he tells jokes and sings songs and ad libs with the audience.

How tone-deaf could this production be not to see that this is not a laughy jokey silly thing, but deeply serious, and deserving of attention rather than poorly-written, deeply cliché hand-wringing about… well I’ve still little idea what it thought it was about.

The best performances – the two women – are restrained and confident and expressive – whereas the man is a caricature of a cunt and he’s the one who the production gives free range do, letting him pluck this annoying guitar and prance about and generally be a knob.

I overheard some women saying afterwards that they felt uncomfortable in the production and I wasn’t surprised. I think it’s deeply uncomfortable to witness a production that allows a character to have paedophilia as a minor-character flaw and asks us to have sympathy for his erectile dysfunction while he talks about watching young women in online porn and simulates wanking into a microphone.

Childish, prurient, damaging, loathsome, unclear, untheatrical, misjudged, and unpleasant.

Wasn’t bored, though.

P.S. If you think any of  this is mean, there are honestly a thousand glowing reviews all over the place from places with real, proper reputations, so seek them out for a different opinion. Also: it’s paedophilia-apologism masquerading as a musical about dating apps, so…

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