Shedding a Skin review, Soho Theatre: Amanda Wilkin is a sensation as a woman on the brink of a breakdown

Winner of the Verity Bargate Award, this one-woman play explores the depths of inter-generational relationships

Amanda Wilkin in ‘Shedding a Skin' (Helen Murray)

Myah is trapped. She’s trapped in a job she hates and a body she’s not comfortable in, with a rapidly dwindling pool of friends. And she’s trapped, centre-stage, in a column of green light, telling us about it. “I would rather be anywhere else in the world right now than right here,” she says, face frozen in a clown-like, distorted grin.

This is the opening scene of Shedding a Skin, Amanda Wilkin’s new one-woman play at the Soho Theatre. The winner of the Verity Bargate Award, the show centres around a thirtysomething woman on the brink of a nervous breakdown (played by Wilkin), who finds herself floating from thing to thing without a relationship, career or purpose. That is, until she moves in with Mildred, an elderly Jamaican woman looking for a lodger.

As Myah, a character dressed in baggy clothes to keep anyone from truly looking at her, Wilkin is a total sensation. Her facial expressions are the driving force behind the show, while her low and throaty laugh underscores each scene with an infectious delight. Wilkin has immense command of her body as a physical performer, folding herself in half as she stoops to Mildred’s height or circling a chair as she recalls the excruciating memory of getting squished in a revolving door with her boss. When she voices other characters – her friends, exes, Mildred herself – she brings them into the room.

Myah has learnt to put barriers in place to protect her from a world that confronts her with daily images of racial violence while deeming her both too black and too white. We see Wilkin wearing her smile like a cartoonish mask, her true pain sneaking through in her incredibly expressive eyes. It’s there present in the show’s deceptively simple set, too, a backdrop of clinical white nylon sheets stretched tight and smooth. They’re a blank canvas on which she can outwardly project her public face, preventing others from getting beneath the surface.

But from the moment she meets Mildred, these literal walls are either pulled down or rolled up like blinds as the elderly woman connects Myah to her heritage and her past. Behind lie wrinkly brown fabrics, skin-like, or sparkling stars just out of reach off stage. It’s been there all along, but has needed that beautiful inter-generational relationship to highlight it.

Wilkin is such a captivating performer that any moment not entirely focused on her feels like a missed opportunity. Myah explains the news on her phone regularly leaves her in tears, with abstract scenes detailing other examples of prejudice occurring hundreds of miles away. While visually impressive, these moments feel (perhaps deliberately) a little out of place. Shedding a Skin excels when using the personal to discuss the political, with topics such as police brutality and workplace microaggressions explored with subtlety. In the moments that shift away from Myah, Mildred and their intertwining lives, I’m left wanting more of the connection we’ve seen grow on stage.