We begin with an ending of sorts as the narrator introduces Chapter one, “The End of Rachel”.
Life is a bit of a whirl for Rachel, juggling a new job she hates and phone calls from a potentially disloyal boyfriend and an understandably solicitous mother. It’s not the exciting writer’s life she wants but she doesn’t know how to finish things off, but perhaps her subconscious does.
Finding herself under the ministrations of a doctor with a wacky bedside manner she seems to have had a misadventure. But the adventure is just starting as she is mistaken for Don Quixote, the self-proclaimed knight errant whose fancy is so taken with books that he believes everything to be real and is tempted to take up his pen and finish the stories properly.
She is either mad and beyond help, it’s one f**ked-up dream, or she has fallen through a rift in the space-time continuum and is the hero everyone perceives her to be.
While she might not want drawn into long quests her mind always seems to come up with something dramatically significant. Soon all sorts of fictional characters are plucked from the depths of her memory, from Elizabeth Bennet to Dick Turpin (and associate highwaymen Dick, Cock, and Balls), scrambled with hard-boiled private-eye Philip Marlowe, Sherlock Holmes, and Van Helsing. Lines are stolen piratically as to who gets called Ishmael as the convoluted action is ported Dragon’s Lair fashion.
To reach “The Beginning of Rachel” she will need to determine whether the pen is mightier than the sword and reform her own narrative.
This ensemble youth theatre piece is an enthusiastically performed knock-about comedy, cleverly written to touch on the portrayal of women, the power of literature and the fighting of foes.
As might be expected it’s not an entirely polished production but it is nicely crafted and is exactly the sort of show that has its place on The Fringe.
Show Times: 15 to 20 August 2022 at 11.25am.
Tickets: £8 (£6).
Suitability: 14+. Contains strong language / swearing.