Written by Mollie Semple and directed by Kayla Stokes, Semple’s one woman play, Good For Her!, debuted at London’s Theatre503 last year to critical acclaim. One year on, it is now having its first rerun at The Other Palace Theatre.
Good For Her! follows Iris, a former child actress who, now at 28, is aspiring to make it big again. With a hyper-critical mother lingering in her shadows, ex-best friend Alice getting all the glory, and an endless stream of rejection emails from agents and producers alike, Iris is doing just fine. Really.
She walks us through the highlights and failures of her life thus far. Her first big claim to fame is starring in a popular television series in America as a child. And then comes her first failure: growing boobs and getting dropped by her agent. Never mind; onto the next great thing: her skinny teenage years. All fun and no fuss, until she enters her self-professed ‘fat era’ at university, after one too many chips with extra mayo and hummus on nights out. We’ve all been there. One recruitment job that becomes a café job that becomes a struggling actor-writer day job later, and Iris is living a life which is not quite what she had anticipated. Her mother is frail, Iris is single and she hasn’t secured an acting job in a long time. She obsesses over her body image, Alice’s daily Instagram posts, and her increasingly distant, yet still strained, relationship with her ailing mother.
Good For Her! is a relatable and entertaining play, teasing itself as a quirky, upbeat story at the beginning, but ultimately revealing itself as a powerful introspection on a young woman just trying to meet her mother’s and her own impossible standards. It’s dark, it’s complex, and it’s entertaining.
Semple is captivating as Iris. She’s a talented writer and compelling storyteller, beautifully mixing humour with a deranged frenzy that cuts deep. It’s a story that is witty and fun, while also being reflective and emotionally driven. She possesses a strong emotional range, pouring heart, humour, mania and obsessiveness into this character to create something darkly funny. There are times that I wanted to laugh out loud during the performance, though it felt wildly inappropriate to do so; an ode to Semple’s sharp nuanced writing.
Semple keeps her audience engaged by utilising digital content throughout this play. She projects an audition gone wrong and some painfully relatable internet searches onto the wall, and also incorporates off-screen voices that lend themselves to the characterisation of Iris, enhancing the audience’s understanding of her. It’s all very well executed. Props to sound consultant Lonnie Ro Wade for their work here. It landed incredibly well and elevated the humour and emotion already radiating in Semple’s gloriously human and honest production.
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