There are any number of biographical and semi-biographical solo shows about feisty woman performers from Edit Piaf to Bette Midler and even the fictional Deirdre Barlow.
For the famous, their perceived glamour is as much part of their appeal as their failures and downfalls, all too often lived out under the public gaze, the media coverage gobbled up with schadenfreude, awe and barefaced nosiness in equal measure.
How refreshing then that Mary Lincoln’s heroine, Marcella, is no more or no less than a jobbing actress, a regular human who has to cope with life’s ordinary challenges like managing a tight budget and an overbearing Italian mother.
Now in her mid-sixties, a drama teacher and mother of two grown-up children, Marcella is forced into her loft, her challenge to clear out eight items of old clutter to make way for eight new items.
On a clothes rail are some of Marcella’s old costumes, each one forming the structure upon which sit engaging narratives that together outline Marcella’s life and reveal the disproportionate influence on it by a guilt-inducing, puritanical Catholic mother,
Hard choices had to be made over the years between what was kept and what had to be given up. Now in the loft, as she sifts through the accumulated “relics of a career”, she has to face again the absence of an item so precious it is almost imbued with superpowers, becoming a metaphor for the younger, fulfilled, Marcella.
Made vulnerable by an enduring grief for its loss, Marcella is triggered into a crisis of realisation and longing that leads to a newfound purpose.
Mary Lincoln plays the partially autobiographical Marcella as nervously energetic and appealingly confident. We can see in her echoes of the former sassy young woman. The text is occasionally contrived, the recital of a poem seems particularly shoehorned in, but Marcella’s story is nonetheless one of sacrifice and unaccomplishment that will resonate with many older women, and it may also light a spark intent. We may close doors in our faces, but we can also open them.