Silly Little Things

Laura Knaggs is a great storyteller and comedian.  In this one-woman show, she plays Rosie, a hapless millennial florist beset by those silly little things that can ruin your life: a breach with your best friend – and you don’t know why – being socially gauche, getting fall-down drunk, being totally broke because your business is failing, having an aggravating if harmless regular customer, enduring a sullen, hostile-dependent employee, battling a nasty, malicious old witch of a neighbour, who smashes the owls you bought to keep off her birds, getting desperate and hooking up with wrong guys in bars, having a really caring Mum to whom you don’t want to admit your failures but who keeps phoning, and – worst of all – losing your best friend just when you need her most.

Knaggs holds our interest and sympathy in this sad and sorry account, first by her beautifully judged comic timing – that is, by being funny - but also sweet, attractive, appealing, vulnerable, malicious, ironic – that is, ruefully if resentfully aware of what a fuck-up her Rosie is.  Knaggs doesn’t just tell Rosie’s tale; she comments on it at the same time.  Her sweetness, her bewildered innocence (‘Why is this happening to me?’) keeps us with her and carries us past the somewhat, well, dubious aspects of her tale – and makes us forgive the things she could have done something about but didn’t.  Like her assistant who’s always leaving the cool room door open… 

Knaggs uses the very small Butterfly Club stage brilliantly, with great guidance from director Sharnema Nougar.  There are also very clever lighting changes – among the best seen at the Butterfly Club – by Hannah Willoughby, reflecting Rosie’s up and down mood changes.  At times, Rosie is in almost total darkness – an apt reflection of how she feels – then suddenly she’s in bright optimistic morning light – before her Mum phones – again…  The stage is bare except for a wooden step stool but her rapid movements and the stool create all the locations the story needs: the shop, the street, the bars, her apartment. 

Then there is the way Knaggs creates – with skilled economy – all the characters listed above - with no more than a voice, an accent, a scowl, an evil cackle, a hateful man-spread, or a hunch of shoulders.  

As Rosie’s dilemmas and miseries accumulate, Knaggs’ writing has that essential ingredient: she keeps us wanting to know what will happen next?  Oh, no! we think.  Now what’s she gonna do?  Some things, of course, can’t be fixed, but there are compensations, some totally unexpected, and some small but so comforting, like watching McLeod’s’ Daughters on the couch with your best mate.

Silly Little Things is Laura Knaggs’ first one woman show.  On this showing, she should go far as writer and actor.  Only two more performances.  Get there if you can.

Michael Brindley