Spin Cycles is a highly polished one-woman show examining wellness, sexualisation, and the varying manifestations of grief. The show is beautifully produced and features an exciting soundtrack to keep the audience entertained. However, what Spin Cycles offers in aesthetics, it lacks in narrative and performance depth.
On entrance, the audience is immersed in the intense world of spinning. We see a minimal set starkly consisting of an exercise bike and a glowing sign reading ‘Sweat’ and Jamie Lee-Money, clad in matching pink yoga gear, is aggressively peddling. She keeps an admirable cool whilst spinning, yet this nonchalance extends largely to her performance, which tipples on one level.
Lee-Money’s character is a wellness journalist who is tasked with reviewing Notting Hill’s latest spinning studio. With this premise, I wanted Spin Cycles to interrogate the dark underbelly of the wellness industry in all its pressures and ugliness. However, spinning was merely the landscape upon which a more personal narrative of grief was painted.
Lee-Money mourns the tragic death of her teenage best friend at 21—a storyline which is set up poignantly but never really fleshed out—and experiences anticipatory grief for her mother who is undergoing breast cancer treatment. This leads to a fear of illness which manifests itself in OCD, alcoholism, and a rejection of her body’s sexualisation, all of which are effectively related but never quite performed convincingly.
The show is elegantly put together though, with powerful lighting and sound design to complement the shifts in mood and subject matter. Yet, these technical alterations often felt like a crutch that Lee-Money’s performance relied upon.
Spin Cycles fades out and nothing really has happened, other than Lee-Money becoming a spin convert, for no real reason beyond it providing a new obsession that distracts from her other issues. The jury is out on whether the absence of a climax really matters in a play which reflects the ongoing plague of living with grief. These things simply cannot be tied up neatly. However, with its exciting premise and important subject matter, the script deserved a momentum that it never really reached.
Spin Cycles is a promising play with slick production that, if nothing more, will likely leave you with a kick to start exercising again post-fringe.
