Edinburgh Fringe 2025
How To Become A Movie Star?
Sarah Maria Lafferty/Felix Culpa Theatre Company
Genre: New Writing, Storytelling
Venue: theSpace @ Surgeons' Hall
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
The tale of an actress with a “unique” plan to become a movie star, involving an out-of-print biography of her childhood hero, a speculative flit to New York, and a course at the world’s strictest drama school. What could possibly go wrong?
Review
Sarah Maria Lafferty has a cunning plan. As an actress with ambition, she’ll crack Holywood and make it to movie stardom by training as a schoolteacher – teaching and acting, acting and teaching – just like her childhood hero, Gabriel Byrne, whose out of print autobiography she has read until she can quote parts of it verbatim.
But to get into movies, you need proper qualifications, leading Lafferty to experience life working in a London pub, dossing in a run down hostel and a drama school which makes Miss Trunchbull look like a fairy godmother.
This will be “the definitive guide on how to become a movie star, or how I’ve wasted the last twenty years”, Lafferty declaims, stepping onto a bare, black back clothed stage, dressed all in black, before revealing what turns out to be a life that, to date at any rate, has been one well lived – a mid-life report, if you will – in a gently engaging and rather enchanting fifty minute monologue.
Lafferty was taken with the stage almost from the day she could walk and talk and has used childhood diaries to construct a narrative of her early struggles to rise above the role of also ran in the many and varied school productions in which she felt she deserved a more prominent position on the cast list. Taking rejection in her stride, she battles on, seeking fame and fortune in the Big Apple before trying a more prosaic route to stardom back in the aforementioned London drama school from hell.
Lafferty tells this amusing tale with consummate skill, spinning a central theme into which she lobs a variety of diversions, the former giving her the opportunity to build a series of cleverly worked punchlines, the latter letting her indulge her taste for a witty side bar or two. Her delivery is exceptional, every word carefully chosen and articulated and she uses every inch of the small, blank stage to leave you with the impression that this is far more than a one-woman show. And the rapidly revolving door of characters in her life are each expertly conceived and articulated using face, eyes, body, voice and movement.
Her humour is gentle and engaging, her mood never straying from the upbeat. You can feel the audience growing ever more on her side, willing her to find the magic key that opens the door to stardom.
And it’s a terrific feat of memory too. Most actors will deliver lines at about 150 words per minute. Lafferty’s infectious enthusiasm meant she was rattling them out at about 180 plus, despite her generous use of the dramatic pause before lobbing in a well thought through punchline. So, she delivered around 9,000 words across the fifty minutes she was on stage, without hesitation, deviation or repetition from the subject matter in hand – not a stumble, not a stutter. Peerless.
There are apparently two key rules in show business – learn your lines and be on time. Lafferty ticked both these boxes and many more besides in what was a master class in storytelling from a peerless raconteur. Highly recommended.
