Giraffe review – sparkling one-woman show stands out from the crowd
It takes a brave writer/performer to make her character a sociopath. How to keep the audience on board with someone who is callous and indifferent?
In Abigail Weinstock’s sparkling one-woman show, 30-year-old Eliana has been caught making clandestine recordings in her neighbour’s bedroom and cannot deny it. A court summons follows. Even then, her first thought is how to game the system.
Her attempt to do so is what gives Giraffe its structure. Eliana has a fortnight until going in front of a judge who will determine whether her temporary restraining order should be made permanent. If she can drum up three letters of support in that time, she has an outside chance of avoiding homelessness (she lives too close to her victim to stay put). With no obvious advocates – her mother long dead, her stepmother intolerant and her father inscrutable – she needs extra resources of imagination to find backers.
Sociopaths, of course, can be ruthless, so Eliana is prepared to bluff her way into a childminding job (reassuring the confused mother that she wishes no harm to her daughter) and mask her true nature from a therapy group in the hope of seeming like a trustworthy citizen.
Everything goes wrong before it comes right in Emma Jude Harris’s production but, on the way, Weinstock gives a delicious portrayal of a physical and emotional misfit who is hopelessly and hilariously at sea with the business of human communication.
What emerges is a quite different diagnosis. Touchingly, in this semi-autobiographical show, Eliana understands the psychology of the silent child she looks after unlike anyone else. It proves she is an emotionally rich human being who just happens to have her own way of interpreting – and misinterpreting – the world. Standing out from the crowd in a human zoo, she and the child are giraffes among zebras. So is this show.
