Bombshells
Arts Theatre Autumn 2004

Batten down the hatches - Hurricane Caroline has hit London, bringing enough energy to light up the whole of the West End. Caroline O'Connor's one-woman show is a whiz-bang of fun and a showcase for the Australian actress-singer-dancer-comic whose time for stardom has come.

O'Connor has been doing this selection of six character sketches by Joanna Murray-Smith down under for a couple of years, winning every award going there, and this August wowed the Edinburgh fringe with a shortened version - see our review below.

The economics of squeezing five or six shows a day in every playing space in Edinburgh force most shows into 90-minute slots, but now we get to see the four characters that were so great there, and two more.

Writing directly to O'Connor's talents, Murray-Smith has created four of the six as perky or high to the point of mania. A harassed young mother races through the day in a cloud of panic, exhaustion and guilt - 'Feed the baby. Clean the baby. Need a coffee. Bad mother!' A teenager bubbles over with the assurance that she'll win the school talent show, even though at the very last second she has to make her Cats choreography fit the theme from Shaft. A bride bounces off the walls in a mix of excitement and fear. And a damaged diva in the Judy-Liza mode goes on with the show despite the ravages of time and unapproved chemicals.

Any one of those set pieces would stop the show in a star-is-born moment in a revue or book musical. One after the other, they're almost overwhelming in the display of O'Connor's abundant talent and inhuman energy.

Slight respite from the hurricane is provided by a couple of quieter pieces, a nervous after-dinner speaker whose lecture on cactus raising morphs into an exposure of her unhappy marriage, and - in a sketch that stands comparison to Alan Bennett - a widow who can speak with resigned irony of the emptiness of her life and who finds new joy in an unexpected source.

So powerful is O'Connor's personality that one might undervalue the skill, cleverness and sensitivity of Murray-Smith's writing. While all the characters are inevitably a bit cartoonish, each sketch is built on recognizable truth and each contains moments and lines of striking beauty.

Forced to find something to criticise, I can only suggest that the six-sketch evening might be a bit long. The Edinburgh package of four (the bride, the mother, the widow and the teenager) left you wanting more. This longer version just might be too much of a muchness. But when was the last time you had to complain about being entertained more than you really needed?

Gerald Berkowitz

Our Edinburgh review, August 2004:

Class tells. So does real talent and star quality. The one-woman show in which the actress plays a string of different characters is a fringe staple, but Caroline O'Connor makes it all seem new and delightfully alive. O'Connor, who looks more like Betty Boop than any living human being has a right to, and who has more energy than Starbucks' annual output of caffeine, introduces and instantly inhabits four very different characters in this script by Joanna Murray-Smith. From the bride-to-be bouncing off the walls in a mix of excitement and dread, to the teenager determined to win a talent contest even if she has to invent a new act seconds before going onstage, O'Connor fills the stage with her vitality while catching all the humour and unforced touches of pathos. In between, we get the run-off-her-feet guilt-ridden-because-she's-not-superwoman mother (and if I have any criticism at all it is that this one sounds a bit too much like the bride) and a quieter Alan Bennettish look at a widow thrilled by the improbability of a sexual fling. Without question one of the high points of the festival. Gerald Berkowitz

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Review - Bombshells - Arts 2004