As Claude emerges from a pile of clothes, she unpacks stories that have led her to her being down in the tube station.
Feeling empty and as insignificant as a speck of dust she is struggling with life and loss. It’s the tenth anniversary of her father’s death and he still haunts her, carried with her in his last birthday photograph and caught in her peripheral vision or in fleeting glimpses of people on the Northern Line. Despite the distress she seems never to have been able to shed a tear.
Perhaps she needs to move on, to leave her dead-end job as a ghost tour guide (she has always felt at one with the dead) and seek fulfilment.
That joy isn’t going to come from other people as she isn’t close to family or friends and tries to avoid the public who stare at her on the tube. Nor does dating seem to be the solution as, while looking to be a lesbian, nights out with inappropriate men have not been a success, in part due to her jokes about death which she employs as a coping mechanism. Not that she is entirely hacking it, and with the added familial pressures of her brother’s upcoming wedding she half seriously contemplates killing herself with an array of unlikely implements.
When she falls on the platform of the Angel tube station she is saved by the elderly Ruth, who might be dead but still wants the rather nasty jumper that Claud is wearing. The offending item was bought for her by her sister from a charity shop under the guise of sustainability but was Ruth’s in a previous life. It may not be fashionable, but it is at least warm, unlike the hugs not given by her family.
Both Ruth and Claude have things to come to terms with if they are to take the next step.
This tragicomedy monologue is engagingly told with droll delivery moving easily from bathos to pathos but could lean more into the emotion and doesn’t quiet knit.
Show times: 31 July to 25 August (not 19) 2024 at 12.50pm.
Tickets: £9 to £12.50 (£11 to £12)
Suitability: 14+ (contains strong language and references to suicide).