Decked in a blue Puma tracksuit top and floral-print baggy jeans, Angelique (Lucy Ansell) strikes a sure and steady figure in London playwright Emma Dennis-Edwards’ Scotsman Fringe First Award-winning play, Funeral Flowers.
Exuding natural charm and abundant confidence, Angelique’s level-headed for a 17-year-old. There’s poetry to the way she talks and swagger to the way she walks. She’s focused on turning a course in floral arrangement into a small business career.
But looks can be, if not deceiving, then certainly misleading in this Australian premiere of Dennis-Edwards’ dazzling show, produced by Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre and directed by the powerhouse Candy Bowers.
What do you mean?
As Angelique holds court on a playground slide, the bric-a-brac of childhood’s primary colours toys mingle with the empty bottles of booze littering the grass that clings to its stepped stone frame.
Funeral Flowers’ subtle but striking signals, captured precisely by set and costume designer Bianca Pardo’s pointed work, remind us that 17 isn’t all that far from childhood. That we still need solid support from the so-called grown-ups in our lives at that age. Support that hasn’t always been there for Angelique, with an absentee father and a mother whose dreams of visiting Paris have been rudely interrupted by a spell inside.
Luckily, Angelique has a newfound rock in Sam. Her proudly queer foster carer supports her goals while insisting the younger woman plays by her house rules of mutual respect.
Of course, Angelique being 17 and used to free-ranging, sneaks out after curfew to see her dubious boyfriend, Micky. Running with a ragged crowd, he’s selling drugs and is caught up in a scary amount of debt owed to the menacing Rampage. They both view Angelique, who’s underage, in insidiously gruesome ways, with an arrangement made between them threatening her modest ambitions for securing her future.
Who else is in the cast?
No one. Funeral Flowers is a one-woman show, hung on a titanic performance by Ansell. Her astonishing, 60-minute monologue navigates everything from Angelique’s colloquial London accent, embracing Dennis-Edwards’ Jamaican and Trinidadian heritage, through the burly depths of the bad boys she’s fallen in with.
Ansell’s equally adept at the bubbly Cockney of Angelique’s kind, but kinda hapless mum and her blasé father as she is at assuming Sam’s sturdier vocal stance. She also skips over to the posh end of town, playing Angelique’s supportive florist mentor, another guiding light in Angelique’s life who’s nevertheless a snob, appalled by what she views as the tacky wedding arrangements that Angelique, as her assistant, adores.
It’s not just Ansell’s vocal prowess that impresses. An iridescent star, Ansell’s physicality shifts with seeming ease as she inhabits these shifting skins and ably navigates the show’s small but mighty staging.
This sounds powerful...
Funeral Flowers surely is. The strength’s in its bones. Dennis-Edwards, who originated the role of Angelique in London, draws on the real-life story of Tottenham’s community leader, Gina Moffatt. On how she turned her life around through a similar passion for floristry, and how working with our hands can help heal what’s in our hearts and heads.
You’ll probs learn a thing or two, too, like a word-up on the misunderstanding of lilies that lend themselves to the play’s deceptively portentous title.
There is great darkness here, and not just in the shadow of the cold blues and dazzling pinks with which gifted lighting designer Kyra Ryan paints Ansell’s face as Angelique’s moods shift. Ansell carries us from heartbreak to hilarity in a heartbeat, as Angelique tackles everything from assault and revenge porn to rebelliously flexing her teenage independence and mothering her mother even as she’s barely holding her own.
It’s a performance for the ages in a show that astounds, including in its fizzing and crackling score, backed by the chatter of London life picked out impressively by composer and sound designer Christian Biko.
Bowers’ strong directorial hand steers the show with a supple muscularity through its staggering tonal swoops. There’s a constant thrum of movement, both emotional and physical, that will have you rapt in your seat, in a rare occasion of wishing a show was longer.
But it’s precisely the length it needs to be, with not a moment wasted by Dennis-Edwards’ keen ear for teenage fear, by the stalwart stewardship of Bowers’ direction, and the momentous achievement of her star, a flourishing Ansell.
Who will love Funeral Flowers?
Anyone who loves to lose themselves in an incredible turn. As brought to glorious life by Ansell, Angelique is a fabulous fiction that feels so magnificently real. A reminder that our dreams are equal parts blossoming passion and the seeds sown by those who care for us most, even if we can’t always see that clearly. The love that’s grown here by Dennis-Edwards, Bowers and her brilliant collaborators is a blooming revelation.
'Funeral Flowers' is on now at Red Stitch Actors' Theatre until August 23, 2026. For more information and to book tickets, head to the website.
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