See How Beautiful I am, Bush Theatre, London
Life in lipstick
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Your support makes all the difference.One person-shows, I've always thought, belong in a church hall or cabaret – as a married colleague said, if she wanted to listen to a man talk about himself for hours, she'd stay home. But every so often, a low-rated art surprises you. Despite its subject, See How Beautiful I Am is not just a show for screamers and trash junkies. And despite its setting – a hospital room where Jacqueline Susann is dying of cancer – it is as uplifting as it is hilarious.
While Jackie's body lies, covered up in bed, her Courrèges-clad spirit roams about, yakking up a storm. Paul Minx's script is immensely clever, not least in what it leaves out. We do hear about, however, Jackie's girlhood; a philandering father and a cold mother made her obsessed with pleasing men.
Her promiscuity sounds, apart from the numbers involved, like the sex of any dull marriage. Bisexual, Jackie slept with Coco Chanel, as well as numerous Jewish comedians whose advanced age and utter self-centredness must have made them seem touchingly paternal. But Jackie never pities herself, or invites us to do so. Minx has made her more palatable and self-aware than she was in life.
Sarah Esdaile's lively, inventive production gives Debora Weston scope for an impersonation that, while enormously ingratiating, doesn't appear deliberately so. This tough broad never knows when she's licked, but knows something more important: no matter how hard you work, you don't get what you most want – or you get it, and find that it's not everything. Jackie makes our laughter catch in our throats when she says that her child would try to stick on her false eyelashes: "They're hard enough to put on if you're not a retard."
Wearing a bath towel like a mink stole, Jackie tallies the pros and cons for her admission to heaven. She imagines God like a cigar-chewing producer, who says, "You bought chopped liver and told the guests you made it." Does keeping her lipstick fresh outweigh such a sin? Jackie thinks so. I hope she was right.
To 6 October 2001 (020-7610 4224)
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