Review by Steve Bennett

This brilliantly put-together production is a fine showcase of a fine comedy actress.

Katherine Jakeways elegantly constructs characters of depth and texture, much richer and more subtle than you have any right to expect. The trio unveiled here all have vast, obvious character flaws, but they are so much more than the one-dimensional stereotypes they could so easily have been.

First is Sylvia Fox, a self-appointed local celebrity who we meet at a corporate do, awkwardly impersonating such up-to-the-minute celebrities as Dot Cotton and Margaret Thatcher. It's no broad spoof, but like Les Dawson's piano playing funny because it's only slightly wrong ­ and sometimes insightfully right: "I wonder what Tina Turner would think of the launderette in Albert Square..."

Fox is a keenly observed pastiche of a chirpy, deluded dreamer on the lowest rungs of the showbusiness ladder, forever chipper in the face of apathy. She trudges the length of the country for a pittance, struggling on to be professional, oblivious to her lack of talent.

Then there's Fay Waddingham ­ brash Essex girl in shell suit and glittery hairclip, the perennial party animal despite being in her thirties, and an embarrassment to the teenagers she 'hangs' with. The detail in the way this driving instructor speaks is spot-on, full of appallingly tiresome false bonhomie, proving that it's not just men who can be nerdishly dull.

Finally the mumsy Elaine Beresford, a self-aggrandising hospital volunteer with an unnatural fixation on the terminally ill, who she taunts mentally and sexually. Her soliloquies drip with morbid bad taste, but elicited only laughs, never an 'eugh'.

But this is not a show primarily about laughs, rather it is about the quality of the vivid portraits Jakeways paints of her tragi-comic creations. And you can the priorities from the script, which boasts plenty of attention to detail, if not quite enough attention to being funny.

The pace can be on the sluggish side, too, even if the well-formed characters' ability to hold the attention is never in any doubt. But while it may only rarely be laugh-out-loud hilarious, the show does achieves what it set out to do, with class.

Review date: 1 Jan 2004
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett