Hull gig theatre maestros Middle Child scored a big hit at last year’s Fringe with ‘All We Ever Wanted was Everything’. And a loyal crowd too, it seems. Follow-up ‘One Life Stand’ - the debut commission from Eve Nicol - attracted an impressively young, impressively up for it, impressively sold out crowd when I went.
The show, directed by Paul Smith, follows three people across one eventful night. Kit (Edward Cole) and Kat (Tanya Loretta Dee) are a couple, though things are not working out well. They barely physically see each other – linked only by the mobile phones that Nicol suggest have rewritten the structure of our lives, potential dangerously.
Kit sends Kat endless cutesy pictures of cats. But he can’t get it up for her in the sack, in part because he watches industrial quantities of borderline illegal porn on his phone, which is also the portal through which he’s assigned work for his zero hour food delivery job.
Kat still loves Kit but is infuriated with herself for doing so. She prefers to compartmentalise different aspects of herself into discrete pockets, and will tonight hook up with ‘moustache wanker’, a man she’s having an occasional affair with.
And finally there’s teenage Momo (Anna Mitchelson). She’s a communist (or a peformative communist), who is going through a hard time irl after a sex video of her and a teacher was uploaded to the internet, but really quite happy just to drift about on her own living her best web life.
In a sense, it feels like there’s not much more to it than that: there is a tangled and somewhat improbable plot whereby the three interact with each other over the course of the night, but it feels like the story is mostly a texture to bind together the various ideas fizzing through the show. At its best it’s a fair bit smarter than ‘All We Ever Wanted…’. But its also woolier, with quieter, less memorable tunes. Lots of fun, but likely to remain overshadowed by its predecessor, which is being reprised for a stint at the end of the Fringe.
