Jolie Klein seems to be the most vacuous and narcissistic person you’ll ever meet. She pushes away friends, lovers and therapists alike with her relentless self-obsession. Whatever has happened, she’s had it Worse Than You. You know the type. Well, perhaps you don’t. There’s much more going on here than you realise.
To engage with Jolie is to be confronted with a trauma dump so big you can’t see around it. That’s effectively the core technique to her self-sabotage, yet she desperately wants the real Jolie to be seen too. Mo Fry Pasic has created a diva with hidden depths; Joelle’s incessant overthinking betrays a restless searching intelligence, which lashes out at others but more often blames itself.
The show is fast-paced and keeps on hitting the mark. Her doomscrolling on her phone is displayed on the screen behind her and is razor sharp and funny, whether she is self-diagnosing or exploring her sexual obsession with the entirely unavailable Captain America. There are bravura scenes, for example in a group therapy session, where she performs one-sided conversations with a host of other people. Through it all, Jolie constructs her own one-woman show within the show.
It is through the scenes with her therapist that we begin to push past Jolie’s bravado and obfuscation, and really start to see her and the trauma she carries. Unusually, Pasic was operating her own tech during these conversations, which was a bit distracting at first – but it does allow her to pace the conversations precisely and achieve something very natural.
This reviewer was too old and too male to get all the references, but the laughs were pretty constant throughout, and anyone can recognise that Mo Fry Pasic is a fantastic performer with an exquisitely crafted show. There’s an ending that seems deliberately created to be shambolic and undercut Jolie’s big moment, but turns out to be one of the loveliest things you’ll see all Fringe. I didn’t see it coming until I felt the catch in my throat.
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