My Brilliant Divorce

Divorce is awful under any circumstances but hits middle-aged women particularly hard. It doesn’t just mean losing a life-long partner. It also involves losing friends, income, routines, all those habitualised comforts and certainties. It’s far harder for a middle-aged woman to get a job or to find a new partner. This is the territory explored by HIT Production’s My Brilliant Divorce, a one-act, one-person play driven by the enormous talent of Mandi Lodge.

In some ways, Angela is the anti-Shirley Valentine (another character played to acclaim by Mandi Lodge), in that rather than finding joy in independence, Angela’s ultimate happiness depends on her finding a new love. Ms Lodge’s Angela is relentlessly cheerful and utterly likeable. She makes the best of her situation with a keen sense of irony and sarcasm, self-effacing without being self-abnegating. Ms Lodge brings extraordinary comic skills to the role, timing each punchline to perfection and drawing vivid images with her words, mime and gesticulation—a scene of an examination involving a chain-smoking gynaecologist is just hilarious. She works with the audience, developing a rapport and engaging their empathy. When she responds to the kindness of a help-line worker, the heart just melts.

For a play written in 2001, it has dated in surprising ways. There are a few uncomfortable cultural stereotypes which might make some squirm. Moreover, other than a few spliced in web addresses and reference to AirBnB, there were almost no signs of the modern electronic world – no email, no mobile phones, no texts, absolutely no social media, and people still wrote long-hand letters, all of which struck a discordant note. Perhaps it might have been better to have solidly set it over the change of the millennium rather than attempt to bring it forward?

That said, Ms Lodge is brilliant to watch. It’s a wonderful, funny play throwing light on a difficult situation faced by many women.

Cathy Bannister