Showing @ Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh until Sat 01 March @ 20:00 (then touring)
What’s up with Andrea? At fifteen she’s been abandoned and abused, and all too early she’s discovered the deceit of the world. ‘Men lie’ she says, the understatement of her young sad life. Is there any degradation that she hasn’t encountered: grooming, date rape, incest? Or (there’s a nagging feeling) are these just the imaginings of a troubled young attention seeker? Indeed, no one in Andrea’s story is quite who they seem, from the would-be boyfriend who becomes her pimp to her landlady who is actually her gran.
Alone on stage with no props Andrea, played with searing intensity by Gemma Whelan, is at turns funny, aggressive, conversational and pleading. And who is she talking to: her therapist, a counsellor, members of the probation panel? There’s talk of her killing her baby and being a victim of the tabloids, of falling for a paraplegic soldier and infiltrating his home. This among the chatter of shopping malls and frozen dinners and second-hand observations like ‘women suggest but men decide’. She constantly oscillates between being a likeable and lovelorn teenager, ineffably sad victim and confessional nutjob with a generous helping of OCD on the side.
This all sounds utterly harrowing and depressing but Andrea is funny and clever, wise beyond her years yet scarily impressionable; a patchwork of personality disorders. She’s a child desperate to be loved and saved. One minute she says ‘sometimes life gets so painful you have to have camouflage’, in the next she’s comparing a pink bed cover to ‘a whale’s tongue’. Dark Vanilla Jungle is superbly written by Philip Ridley and Whelan’s 80 minutes alone on stage (alternately joshing with and hissing at the audience) is a tour de force, almost more like a piece of powerful performance art than just theatre. David Mercatali‘s production rightly trails a host of awards and plaudits behind it.