FringeReview UK 2025

Claire Dowie See Primark and Die Finborough

Producer Neil McPherson for the Finborough Theatre

Genre: Biographical Drama, Comedy, Contemporary, Fringe Theatre, LGBTQ+ Theatre, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Political, Short Plays, Solo Play, Theatre

Venue: Finborough Theatre

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

Shopophobia? Jed, Jedi, even Jesus helping you up after a panic attack outside Peckham’s Primark? So why is he (He?) later holding up overripe bananas and squashed cake? And what is it with slugs raining from outer space? Or zombie food attacking pensioners? After cheery greetings, Claire Dowie introduces her final play of four: the 2009, recently-revised See Primark and Die. Claire Dowie’s Swansong, a quartet of solo plays staged in rotation, comes to Finborough directed and designed by Dowie’s collaborator of over 40 years, Colin Watkeys, till July 5^th.

There’s just Dowie, blue lighting, music (including John Adams, John Williams’ Star Wars and Queens of the Stone Age) and a Primark dress-rail with white tat hanging. Dowie flicks but this time never changes clothes. Will the dress-rail take flight? Since why is washing leaving washing-lines as you flash by on a train, then morphing from 96-years-old-but-dead Aunt Alice into a fit young woman; who smiles at you as you gaze out of the quiet carriage? And Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves and a bin? Have we discovered the Fiscal Rules at last? Dowie reveals them. Via cutting the Daily Mail up into neat squares for toilet paper (the magnificent Aunt Alice), or a five-year—old girl going with mummy into M&S and coming out ten minutes later in twin-set-and-pearls, carrying a copy of the Telegraph. Having only gone in for a wee.

What we’re experiencing is a new phobia sweeping the country. Forget lengthy analyses of late capitalism though that’s exactly what Dowie’s serving: Dowie does it even more engagingly than Mark Fisher; dancing too. Dowie starting from jokey low self-esteem splits open Monty Python’s bargain (“Albatross, get your albatross”) into why options poison you differently. I mean literally, even snails die differently, in French, when dealt M&S salt. Drill down, as politicos tell us, and there’s an anarchist exploding with joyous rage at our options. Not just consumerism, but recoil from tat. Primark, whose motto must be: ”We work them harder so you don’t have to.” Don’t blame Dowie for that one though.

There’s also snipes at getting fitter and more miserable. Dowie diagnoses the NHS crisis: instead of happily smoking, drinking and dying young, we’re all miserably fit, so the government doesn’t receive all those cig/alcohol taxes anymore; and we live forever. So that’s why. There’s much more like this in a work full of sly returns and one-liner solutions to the world. Well Peckham.

And there’s always Andrea. This story’s also heart-warming but be warned. It involves digging for victory (“lunch… eventually”) and emulating your aunt’s lifestyle.

Indeed there’s recycling beyond circular jokes. Aunt Alice disposed of as she’d wish, coming up against rules, including burial and supermarkets with sell-bys. And what people can be eaten by pigs (really near the well, knuckles are harder to digest, but trust pigs).

Dowie’s language is sometimes a bit like Anglo-Saxon on speed. One full of anaphora (think the Beatitudes), of layered poetic use of the everyday. That’s particularly true of early work and Dowie’s 2019 When I Fall… If I Fall. Otherwise (as here) it alternates more frequently with slabs of prose where internal repetitions are delivered with pace, aplomb, building layers of emphasis; and ad-libs. Not Ads, you understand, but apps. Dowie’s particularly adept at self-correction, trip-up lines, the confiding and sudden speeding-up to indicate panic or frustration.

Each play lasting 65-70 minutes, it’s possible to see all four without overload. I said about Adult Child/Dead Child that “entering the litanic world of Claire Dowie is like hearing a Victoria Wood joke drawn over a hot piano wire. Without the piano.”

This 2025 version of See Primark and Die is also the richest linguistically, full of jokes that detonate later. I said Victoria Wood. But here there’s more than a touch of Ken Campbell about the way Dowie structures her circular storytelling. In fact it’s tighter and recalls Daisy Campbell. Here it’s at its most consummate, most artful and repays re-reading to catch Dowie at your throat.

Stage Manager Ted Walliker, Production Photography Colin Watkeys

General Manager Tara Marricdale, Assistant General Managers, Esther Knowles, Jenny Crakes, Assistant Resident Director Jillian Feuerstein, Cover Art Designer, Jillian Feuerstein 

Producer Neil McPherson for the Finborough Theatre

Published June 27, 2025June 27, 2025 by Simon Jenner