Amy Trigg is a glorious storyteller and Reasons You Should (n’t) Love Me is an exuberant example of how powerful a one-woman show can be.
Amy Trigg – Photo by Marc Brenner.Trigg plays Juno, and a cast of contributing characters, showcasing her range as an actor and her ability to seduce an audience into investing heavily in their stories.
Juno has spina bifida, uses a wheelchair, and from the very beginning of the play she engages us with her charm, warmth and ability to laugh at the world and herself. Juno is relentlessly upbeat, with a smartly cynical sense of humour, but there are hints of a dark side, an attempted suicide when she was eight, the ongoing physical pain and her loneliness.
We meet her friends, Mel, Kev and Simon who all feel carefully nuanced and real. We follow her ambivalent ‘romance’ with the emotionally absent Kev and her adolescent infatuation with Justin Rogers ‘the most beautiful human on the planet’ and their frustrated attempts to connect.
Jean Chan’s set design is perfect for this play, from the dramatic opening to the way the Capri Sun box transforms from hospital to party with the help of some clever lighting design by Guy Hoare.
Charlotte Bennett’s direction is spot on, keeping pace and energy so that the 85 minutes of monologue are full of motion but allowing for still moments when the narrative demands it.
This is a play about longing and loneliness, friendship and frustration. Juno is Immensely relatable and resilient and Trigg proves herself versatile as both a performer and a writer.
Review by Roz Wyllie
For a long time, I didn’t know how it’d work. Or what I’d be able to feel. People would ask me if I could have sex and I’d feign shock and act wildly offended whilst secretly wanting to grab them by the shoulders and be like “I don’t know, Janet!”
Juno was born with spina bifida and is now clumsily navigating her twenties amidst street healers, love, loneliness – and the feeling of being an unfinished project.
Winner of The Women’s Prize for Playwriting 2020, Amy Trigg’s remarkable debut play Reasons You Should(n’t) Love Me is a hilarious, heart-warming tale about how shit our wonderful lives can be.
The Women’s Prize for Playwriting, Paines Plough, 45North and Kiln Theatre’s
REASONS YOU SHOULD(N’T) LOVE ME
Written and performed by Amy Trigg
Directed by Charlotte Bennett, Designed by Jean Chan, Lighting Design by Guy Hoare, Composer and Sound Design by Elena Peña.
26 May 2021 at 7pm
at Kiln Theatre
269 Kilburn High Road, London, NW6 7JR
https://kilntheatre.com/