FringeReview UK 2025
Kindling
Ladybird Productions in association with Park Theatre
Genre: Comedy, Contemporary, Drama, Feminist Theatre, LGBT, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Theatre
Venue: Park Theatre 90, Finsbury Park
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
What could possibly go right? Especially when you’re lost, wet, perimenopausal and can detonate secrets you’ve kept from each other out of sheer ignorance? Sarah Rickman’s Kindling directed by Emma Gersch plays at Park Theatre 90 till November 15.
Sarah Rickman and Ciara Pouncett have assembled a superb team. They need to revisit the script once or twice more and they’ll have a winner.
Review
“If they loved me and I loved them, surely they will love each other.” Mei has ordained it. Five best friends of Mei who’ve mostly never met before now stumble through a forest at her command: to scatter her ashes. What could possibly go right? Especially when you’re lost, wet, perimenopausal and can detonate secrets you’ve kept from each other out of sheer ignorance? Sarah Rickman’s Kindling directed by Emma Gersch plays at Park Theatre 90 till November 15.
Thankfully it’s not Tim Firth’s Sheila’s Island; though there’s surely a mischievous nod to the format, especially over the bonding trope: this one though ordained from beyond the grave. Rickman’s more interesting altogether, and in her second play tackles an issue she’s long discussed. Though not unique, Kindling is a marker and speaks to a major demographic in any audience. It’s Rickman’s second play, after The Existence Formula which started at the defunct Bunker Theatre in 2017. Kindling seems too a project born of theatre and film professionals who act, write and produce. Actor Rickman herself plays ‘Wreck it Rose’ – the sister-in-law whose pratfalls and daffiness (think a ditz of Alice Tinker) goof seraphically into the play’s apotheosis. Having forgotten the main tent and bringing the wrong map, Rickman’s Rose manages a blank-eyed bemusement at her own tangles; and can enact the comic timing she writes of.
Apart from playing city careerist Sue, Ciara Pouncett produces the show – she and Rickman co-founded Ladybird Productions to address the life and issues of women over 35, and promote them in the industry, as well as raise awareness of the perimenopause. Pouncett has several theatre premieres as well as Eastenders and Sky’s Smothered to her credit. Perhaps there’s a running in-joke on producers. Here the ‘work’ friend, Sue’s the tensed explosive organizer triggered by others and nurses betrayal. She missed Mei’s last moments and giving her own eulogy (somehow Rose steps in); and layers peel slowly back. It’s uber-organised Sue who can’t get a signal, but has brought above all a pack full of wine. So why has Mei nicknamed her ‘Sex-Tape Sue?’ Indeed Mei’s gifted them all soubriquets. Did she love them or collect them? Mei’s voiced by Eugenia Low, but her most memorable words are spoken by others.
The first thing to strike one is Abi Groves’ superlative woodland set. Backed with a well-integrated woods image the space is thickened with branches and forest-floor detritus. Perfect for Park 90’s sightlines, this is the finest set to land here for some time. Lit by Chloe Kenward to moments of twilight and pitch dark (there’s a moment of Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy) it’s as integral as Esther Ajai’s sound, which brings bumps in the night amongst other things. Since characters give up on a quick exit and prepare to bivouac for the night. Good luck with that.
Gersch helms and blocks what could easily be a rambling plot: it’s well-paced and clarifies what could be muddy in several ways. The tightly, idiomatically written script – the kind you expect from actors turning to playwriting – lacks overall direction; and essentially concludes with one well-prepared reveal. The best of this is a Chekhovian musing on what it’s like to be a perimenopausal woman contemplating your invisibility cloak. Better than dying young of cancer, the melancholy of departure is something Kindling touches on, but touches off from without eddying in profundities.
Several leads aren’t followed up and some plotlines go nowhere. One character, and certainly Mei herself, is described as narcissistic, but this hangs. There’s a shoehorned climax to the end of Act One in this tour-hour script with interval; but the situation’s vanished on our return. Occasionally words are lost, and just occasionally there needs to be clear diction; overall though the actors are vibrant, above all thoroughly inside their roles. You believe in all of them.
In a world of growing-off children, HRT patches, oestrogen gel, flushes TV personality references and vibrators, it’s peacemaker Cathy (Scarlett Alice Johnson) who’s usually offering frank advice: that some are still in denial over. Cathy, prepared to apologise to Sue, even though it’s Sue’s temper at fault, plays conciliatory parent, though not quite earth-mother. There’s special teas and moments of calm. In a strong cast, perhaps Johnson’s is the most fully realised character, with nuance and incipient sadness.
Laconic Jules (Stacy Abalogun) only slowly emerges; you feel the part’s slightly underwritten even for a terse, quietly cynical character. Mei apparently outed Jules decades ago, but did she do her any favours? Abalogun surprises and compels in her big moments.
‘Plastic fantastic’ Jasmine (Rendah Beshouri) as the ideal mum and homemaker has all sorts of indignities visited upon her, and one feels Jasmine (pronounced “Jasmeen” she reminds people testily) is another character Rickman ably conjures but doesn’t fully develop. There’s life in that Vuillton bag that’s not unpacked.
A comic denouement it might be wrong to call delicious, and a touching conclusion clarify a play whose realism includes a built-in meander, as well as magnificent set and production values including acting – which push this production up a notch. There’s much to enjoy here. And much to develop. Kindling is about two drafts away from fully-fledged. It has the feel of an unwinding TV series with more room than a two-hour play, and needs theatrical structure as well as the excellent dialogue to land. There’s several linked post-show discussions too.
It ought to have a life beyond this run, though at the moment fringe and amateur productions beckon most. Rickman and Pouncett have assembled a superb team. They need to revisit the script once or twice more and they’ll have a winner.
Associate Director Esther Fernandez Guerra, Stage Manager Victoria Rose, Costume Supervisor Elizabeth Lewis, Producer Ciara Pouncett, Production Photography Holly Darville, Tristram Kenton.
