3.5

	Marlborough Theatre (venue website) Theatre 12-15 May, 6:00pm-7:00pm Reviewed by Carmel Doohan
Parental Guidance. Under-17's must be accompanied by an adult.  Warning: Contains strong language.  World Premiere.

A one-woman show is a brave thing to attempt. Gina Davis seems self-conscious to begin with, but works through her nerves and settles into what turns out to be a gently insightful piece of theatre.  As therapist Tina Thomas, she is doing a feature for Psychology Today by answering the questions she usually asks her patients.

At times, Ana Maria Bamberger's writing is rich and layered. Interesting psychological and social themes are allowed to develop as Tina's story progresses; the conflict between seeing a patient as a case number or an actual person, and the issues surrounding that distinction, are acted out in a visually arresting way. Simple props are used well; when Tina tries to delete something on her Dictaphone and re-record, it develops into a subtle play on our desire to eradicate parts of our past and bring about personal change.

The problem is that it’s sometimes hard to tell whether Tina's repressed way of describing things is a sophisticated way of looking at how our minds work, or just a weak performance. Her speech too is riddled with clichés and painfully-obvious denial; at times I wondered whether her repeated loops of explanation, and scathing references to her one-dimensional husband, were simply a product of bad writing. Luckily, as the 'session' progresses, important truths are revealed beneath her repetitive ramblings, and it becomes clear that this is a careful study into how we think – and how change might be possible.

Minds, like one-act plays, can be tricky things. While some sections of this monologue are far more engaging than others, there is – fittingly – a lot more going on than one woman’s stream-of-consciousness might at first suggest.