Wake Up Theatre is a new company based in the North of England - founded only last year by three women aiming to create platforms that offer women a new voice. Lauren Nicole-Mayes, Emily Curtis and Chantell Walker are now reviving their first show in London after a sell-out run in Manchester: a two-hander called ‘Eggs’ with Walker directing.
Focusing on two characters known only to us as ‘Girl One’ and ‘Girl Two’ - the play examines the ‘frenemyship’ between them that was borne out of the death of a mutual friend: Rose. Both on the brink of their third decade, the two lead very different lives - ‘Girl One’ a struggling Performance Artist who scrapes a living walking dogs; and ‘Girl Two’ a career woman who, despite trying to leave her job with her pervert of a boss with the “massive moist thumbs he massages my neck with”, finds it impossible owing to the surprisingly constant pay rises. Meanwhile Girl One loses her only means of income after “losing Rachel from S Club 7’s basset hound”... and Girl Two persists with her pursuit of trying to find a man who is not put off by her “overly passionate” approach and willing to give her the children she feels born to have.
With one woman desperate to lose the constraints of her well paid albeit all-encompassing job to embrace motherhood (in spite of her seemingly unenduring relationships) and the other desiring to be a “sexually self-satisfied woman” who views child-bearing as a “vanity project to facilitate women’s needs to be needed” these two are poles apart both ideologically and financially. And with rich, astute and extremely witty dialogue by writer Florence Keith Roach, the audience are presented with a compellingly shifting dynamic between our two protagonists who are - in their own dysfunctional way - undoubtedly teetering on the edge.
Both Curtis and Nicole-Mayes are a brilliant double act: one supposedly the ‘straight girl’ and the other zanily unhinged and off-the-wall. They are the ‘Liver Birds’ for the millennial age - which for those of us who weren’t around in the 1970s, was an iconic portrayal of two very different young women sharing a flat together during the years that immediately followed women’s lib and the birth of the pill. And while our millennials yearn for the bygone 90’s era of clubbing, tequilas and party drugs, their core dilemmas and take on life isn’t too far removed from 1972 Liverpool.
This is a play worth seeing and a company worth looking out for. With sharp, well crafted performances from two very talented performers, superb direction and a very funny, thought-provoking script, the play takes off after a slow first five minutes and holds our attention fully for the just over an hour running time. There are some hilarious moments - not least the shell-suited clubbing scene as our two heroines try to blend in with a plethora of teenagers; and highly amusing references to the (actually pretty suspect) Scarlett Johansson Sci-fi film ‘Alien’ with Girl One dealing with her sexual frustrations having taken to “prowling the streets of Hull in a puffa jacket - like Scarlett!”. (I promise it’s much funnier than it sounds…)
And although on the surface Eggs may seem to be a play that is going over the well worn ground of whether women want children or not, this is in fact a piece of theatre that takes copious risks, whilst taking us on an uncertain, edgy but very human journey of two young women wrestling simply with how to live among the confusion and at times carnage of our modern day so-called ‘evolved’ society.
Reviewer - Georgina Elliott
on - 30/4/19
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