Confetti review, Map Studio Cafe/tour

Wedding belles

Confetti is a small play with a grand design. Most of the action happens in a Yorkshire pub. Its staging in an upstairs bar the size of front room, is perfect. The two rows of audience become part of the event, which erupts before us in a series of conversations and agitations that are so authentic we're effectively punters at an adjoining table.

Nicola Baldwin's award winning play was written during, and is set in, the slump of the early 1990s, but the politics of the time are not explicit in this tale of a girl with a hunger for adventure and for whom small town life is so claustrophobic she's suffocating. Linda's fear of going under is constantly reinforced with allusions to the bleak landscape, the Moors Murders and to dreams buried.

Aged 15, excluded from school, and fed up of waiting for benign aliens to whisk her away, Linda is upping sticks. Stopping at the pub on her way out, she's talked into drinking Pernod shots with Jackie, who's getting married that afternoon and is waiting for groom, Spike, to carry out the single task allocated to him - the purchase of confetti. What follows is a funny, moving, explosive look at the impositions of (and on) small communities with limited aspiration, imagination and expectation. The cast of seven is superb.

In conclusion: Helen Sheals' direction uses every inch of the space at the Map Studio Cafe, effecting surprisingly fast switches of mood, scene and action. A steal at £10 a ticket and worth the trip to NW5.

References
Map Studio Cafe