We’re not in unfamiliar territory with Isy Suttie’s new show, which is about the frantic search for Mr Right as youth ebbs into middle age. Neither are we afforded great insights into the phenomenon – surprisingly, given that Suttie has written a book on the subject, from which the show borrows. But who needs novelty when there’s this much warmth, quiet wisdom and vivid incident of the type that must either be true, or dreamed up by someone hypersensitive to the everyday strangeness of human behaviour, of how we live and love?
The hour zips by, in other words, as the ex-Peep Show star fashions her embarrassing relationship memories into endearing stories and songs. There’s Roy the papier-mache penguin, crafted by Suttie as a love token but doomed to stand sentry by her bedside as romance wanes. There’s her Slovenian flatmate Anya, who consoles the jilted-again Isy with a neo-Dietrich ditty called We All Die Alone.
Almost all of this – the refusal to date men who like the sea, the fear of wasting the music of Tom Waits on impermanent relationships – feels so idiosyncratic that it could only belong to Suttie, without ever seeming self-conscious. Cliches are kept at bay, although a song lamenting her London friends’ migration to the countryside strays close.
The intimacy is circumscribed. Even in this short set, there are long digressions – including a reading from her GCSE history exam paper, and a skit about postal facilities at Portsmouth station. In a show about the quest for love, Suttie bares just a little of her soul, and even that’s at a distance: she’s now happily partnered up, with a baby daughter to boot. What we get, though, is a lovely, confident set: a look back – with only the slightest of shudders – at that limbo period when youthful singledom was flagging but grownup coupledom refused to begin.
- At South Street Arts Centre, Reading, on 6 February; The Wardrobe, Leeds, on 8 February. Then touring.
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