Shedding a Skin, Soho Theatre, review: how many personae can one young woman hold?

‘I would rather be anywhere. Anywhere else in the world, right now. Than right here.” This is how Shedding a Skin, the debut play by London-based actress Amanda Wilkins, opened at the Soho Theatre last night, but it wasn’t a view shared by much of the audience, back in this small, buzzy West End space for the first new production since March last year.

The play, which won its writer and star Soho’s 2020 Verity Bargate Award for new writing – plus effusive endorsements from judges Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Russell T Davies – is a shrewd and zingy comedy, which takes a surprisingly tender turn into a tale of a slowly emerging mother-daughter bond between two black women. Wilkins is the sole performer and plays all the characters, but most of the time she’s thirtysomething Myah, a twist on the increasingly familiar trope of millennial-woman-on-the-verge; her recent counterparts include Arabella from Michaela Coel’s TV drama I May Destroy You and Waller-Bridge’s lead character in the stage and TV comedy Fleabag.

Paralysed by a cold, dull office job where she is one of four black employees – a setting cleverly evoked by a set of soulless, sliding white panels – and a dead-end relationship with a privileged climate activist who lives on a barge and says things like “violence is never the answer”, she sheds both within the (snortingly funny) first 15 minutes, after a grimly tokenistic command to join an office “diversity” photo triggers a full-scale meltdown.

Like Waller-Bridge in Fleabag, Wilkins undercuts goofy physical comedy with a withering interior monologue: one moment she’s flinging her fists to the sky in a triumph of footballer-level exuberance, the next embarrassedly scrunching her body in on itself. The jokes are better for not being benign: this is someone who uses laughter as a mask, as much for the audience as for other characters, and Wilkins has the ability to show it at the moments it slips, when she feels “sick, defeated… like a kid hiding in a woman’s skin.

What should ensure that Shedding a Skin won’t simply glide into the shadows of its decorated forebears is its breaks from the first person, the intrusion of compelling voices into Myah’s monologue. This happens most often via Mildred, a tiny, elderly Jamaican woman who becomes her flatmate and unlikely fairy-godmother. Wilkins conjures her up with an effortlessly underplayed Jamaican accent, dipping and rising slightly with irony, as when she makes Myah tell her how much she’s paid for everything in her shopping bags, with the comfortable superiority of those who have lived longer and know better.

Myah’s Gen-Z friend Kemi, meanwhile, is a clever counterbalance to the elements of stereotype that creep into the generation-gap dynamic between Myah and Mildred. For Kemi is somehow ageless, spewing long-toothed wisdom in the idiom of a teenager. “You’ve been a bit of a dick, yeah, but sounds like you’re hurting,” she tells Myah (anguished after yelling at Mildred) with simple kindness.

But ultimately, this is Myah and Mildred’s story, a lovely, wholesome middle finger to the toxic rhetoric of the culture wars. As they become closer, the set opens out with light and colour: Myah tugs down the white linen panels to reveal gold fairy-lights and mirrors, a visual evocation of the skin-shedding of the title, and an effective if clumsy metaphor for the rebirth she undergoes through the play.

One thing that doesn’t work are the vignettes that serve as scene changes, GCSE Drama-flavoured, in which a spaced-out voiceover describes random and perfunctory feel-good tales of “connection” while a graphic resembling the Facebook log-in page design is projected over the stage. Breaking the naturalism with something surreal is a bold idea, but it needs more thoughtful writing and more interesting staging to succeed.

The best moment of the night is early and fleeting: a few lines of dialogue between Myah and the office cleaner (Wilkins talking to Wilkins), in which he tells her that the horrible photoshoot she disrupted was something he had volunteered for and actively wanted to be a part of. It bursts the cosy comic balloon Myah has spent minutes inflating for herself and the audience, forcing the (mostly white) audience to confront the reality of other people and their different points of view. That, after all, is the point of diversity – and, coincidentally, storytelling too.

Until July 17. Tickets: 020 7478 0100; sohotheatre.com