Lynn Faces , written by Fringe First winner Laura Horton and co-commissioned by New Diorama Theatre, Norwich Theatre, and Theatre Royal Plymouth, comes with high expectations. It’s delightfully engaging and describes itself as ‘lightly chaotic’.
Leah, played by Madeleine MacMahon, is trying to recover from a breakup. After a drunken night, she corrals her two friends, Shonagh (Holly Kavanagh) and Ali (Peyvand Sadeghian), into forming a punk band and putting on a gig. They perform various songs in true punk style as they are unable to play their instruments (their words!).
Meanwhile, the true nature of Leah’s toxic relationship is revealed while their self-belief gradually recovers. At one point, the absent drummer turns up. Joy, played by Laura Horton (with an amusing absence of joy), is the writer’s acting debut and gives us one of the funniest ‘songs’ ever (I can reveal no more). Lynn is the fictional PA to Alan Partridge who perfected the art of pulling a long-suffering face – a face Leah is accused of pulling, then becoming obsessed with gathering that facial expression from others. This leads to the fateful meeting with her ex. The band is named Lynn Faces in that honour, first appearing wearing cardboard masks of Lynn.
There is so much to like about this play: the wincingly true words, the painfully bad songs with such truthful lyrics, Madeleine MacMahon’s engaging Leah who gives such a truthful and charismatic performance, not to mention the sudden appearance of a large crocheted prop (avoiding spoilers). There is a moment where a huge revelation occurs which kept the audience in rapt silence and almost tearful.
However, the pace at the beginning was very slow. The humour of trying to present a bad gig, the lights going wrong, etc., was all rather forced, and the comedy timing seemed to get lost as the actors tried too hard to be funny.
Once the script took over and the characters started to reveal themselves, the natural humour shone through with some wonderfully tragi-comic moments to treasure. With some further development and judicious script editing, this play could achieve so much more.
Lynn Faces is also a rather wonderful homage to friendship and how they get you through difficult times. The play tackles a challenging subject with delicate humour, topped off with some really rather catchy punk tunes with absurd lyrics that you can’t help but hum along with.
