It’s a Sheet Show
★★★★☆ Strong debut
Greenside Riddles Court (Venue 16): Fri 2 – Sat 17 Aug, 2024
Review by Tom Ralphs
It’s a Sheet Show, Fools and Thieves’ Fringe debut in a coproduction with The Counterminers, is set in and around a bed. However, there’s nothing tired about the play – or the production – as a series of short scenes track a relationship from its early moments to its demise in a little over fifty minutes.
The script by Florence Carr-Jones and Leo Shaw is more of an exploration around the awkwardness of bedtime conversations and the gap between the moments of passion and the moments when you just want the bed to yourself, than it is a fully formed single narrative.
Greta Abbey and Leo Shaw in It’s a Sheet Show. Pic: Benjamin Atkinson.
After opening with a Philip Larkin poem played over a speaker that sounds as if it’s an audio book being listened to by a 20 something female in a bed, followed by a 20-something man entering the room and continuing where Larkin left off, the play switches to the unnamed couple, played by Greta Abbey and Shaw, who are at the heart of the play.
She is a chef who works long hours that makes it easy for her to turn down any suggestions of actual nights out. He is trying to get her to meet his mother. The implication is clear; he is more interested in a serious relationship than she is. The beauty of the script and of Abbey and Shaw’s performances are that this, along with the personalities that lie behind the people having the conversation, come out without being directly spoken.
As the next scene gets underway, it’s not immediately clear if it’s a flashback, a different couple entirely, or one of him or her with someone else. It doesn’t really matter as the scene is another incredibly well observed vignette where he comes across as a nervous person desperately trying to say the right thing and worrying that he’s saying the wrong thing, while she is far more confident and self-aware.
non-linear
The non-linear arrangement of scenes continues and it becomes clearer that it’s switching between scenes featuring the main couple and scenes between her and her male friend and confidante, and him and a female friend who is more of a lad than he is and will always look to deliver a joke at his expense rather than let him wallow in his misery.
Leo Shaw and Greta Abbey in It’s a Sheet Show. Pic: Benjamin Atkinson
Abbey and Shaw switch effortlessly between the people and personas they’re playing. Their performances bring out the through line, in how he and she are when they are with each other or when they are with friends. It also shows how they are both putting on a show when they are together, trying to appear nonchalant, indifferent or decisive, for fear of being seen as disinterested, needy, or just confused about who they are or what they want.
The friends have their own personalities and stories rather than simply acting as foils to the main characters, and this is also captured in the performances.
Carr-Jones’s direction is light and breezy, with scenes merging into one another but never taking too long before it becoming clear that it’s a different time and a different combination of people.
In style, it’s probably closer to Stephen Moffat’s sitcom Coupling, with awkward moments and subsequent dissections, than it is to Friends. But there is a universality about the characters and situations that make them feel like people you know or things you’ve lived through.
The writing, direction and performances all make Fools and Thieves a company to watch out for.
Running time: 55 minutes (no interval)
Greenside Riddles Court, Willow Studio, 322 Lawnmarket, EH1 2PG (Venue 16)
Friday 2 – Saturday 17 August 2024
Daily (not 11): 8.55pm (1 hr)
Tickets and details: Book here.
Fools and Thieves links:
Instagram: @fools_and_thieves
ENDS
