The Only Girl in the World
4 May 2008
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The Only Girl in the World is a poignant three-hander, telling the story of Joe and Mary, who fall in love and fall apart, while a serial killer stalks the streets of Whitechapel. Alex Clifton’s seductive revival moves with a fluidity that matches the shifting rhythms and moods of Glyn Maxwell’s skilful, colloquial verse. His cascading words are ‘like fish / the way they’re slipping out’, gleaming, supple and lithe.
Paul Burgess’ design makes the most of the Arcola Studio’s atmospheric dinginess, against which discarded dresses are splashed like pools of lamplit blood. A plaintive, sinister fiddle mingles with snatches of music-hall songs in an evocative soundscape that eerily catches the half-familiar strangeness of past time.
As Joe, John Wark has brilliantly mastered the poor man’s painstaking eloquence, and the cadence of hesitant optimism that inevitably invites disillusion. His visceral struggles to find the words for his love and his loss are painful and funny and heartbreaking. As the red-headed ‘unfortunate’ who changes his life Jennifer Kidd is vibrant and mercurial, wilful and self-destructive, switching between languages as often as she changes her name. But whether Mary, Marie-Jeanette, Mary-Jane or Ginger, she touchingly exposes the raucous fragility of a negotiable identity. Both actors occasionally give bigger performances than the intimate space and confiding poetic register of the piece demand, but their interactions are assured and beautifully timed and there’s real tenderness and frustration and need in their relationship. The third figure in the story is the ominous fiddle-player. Andrew Mathys is a gaunt, patient watcher, losing himself in the shadows, before finally stepping into the limelight to take a decisive hand in the drama.
This is a gorgeous production, maybe a little over-long, but not scared of talking directly to an audience, and demanding that they care about the struggles of people who’ll only ever make the headlines for the wrong reasons. According epic, meticulous, poetic attention to the minutiae of Mary and Joe’s shared life, The Only Girl in the World insists upon the importance of remembering the real people who get lost when public horrors shatter hidden, private lives.
The Only Girl in the World is at the Arcola Theatre until 24 May.
- Cover image: Mary Jane Kelly (Jennifer Kidd) and Joseph Barnett (John Wark)
- Top image: Mary Jane Kelly (Jennifer Kidd) and Joseph Barnett (John Wark)
- Bottom image: Mary Jane Kelly (Jennifer Kidd)
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