“Wanna feel loved? I’m no magician; I’m just French.”

Editorial Rating: 4  Stars (Nae Bad )

As a regular visitor to the Fringe for some years now, I’ve always had a soft spot for single-handed shows. So often the preferred vehicle for solo female performers, they can frequently take you by surprise, drawing from the almost infinite well of personal imagination and experience, unhindered by the theatrical presumptions inherent in a full-cast play. This slick, energetic, and well-staged production is written and performed in English (with occasional forays into Française) by the French film and TV actress Aude Lener.

Part stand-up comedy, part pop-philosophical treatise, part scatological cabaret, Lener delivers a wryly amusing exploration of a single woman’s life as she realises that the pursuit of love is slipping through her ageing fingers. As she wearily notes with a particularly gallic take on her situation: “Wanna feel loved? I’m no magician; I’m just French.” There is physical action a-plenty as Lener presents us with a rapid-fire series of vignettes enacting her somewhat crazy social and family life. These include a rather clever whiteboard presentation; much skilful use of a banana as a visual metaphor (oh, how the ladies in the front row giggled); the funniest rendition of Amazing Grace I’ve ever heard; and the recurring ghostly presence of her Aunt Madeline, who is dead but won’t lie down and keeps intruding into Aude’s life like an escapee from some grand guignol show at a seedy theatre in 1950s Pigalle.

Lener herself is something of a dramatic phenomenon. Her demure movie star face is elastic enough to quickly contort into a thousand visual caricatures to suit as many different voices, some her own internal monologue, others those of relatives, friends, and a succession of would-be lovers. With her pacy and emphatic delivery, she packs much observational humour, wit, and physicality into this 50-minute whirlwind of a show. Maybe it’s a cliché of national stereotyping for me to say that Lener’s French accent imbues her comedic insights with a philosophical authority that just wouldn’t be there if it came from a British actress? But it does.

So if, like me, you’re looking for something a little different to seek out in a small black-box studio theatre and won’t lose sleep if you never again see yet another angst-ridden portrayal of Emily Brontë or Mary Shelley, get yourself to TheSpace @ Surgeon’s Hall (Theatre 3) to laugh along with this quirky little gem.

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