In the space of a week, I’ve seen six plays featuring a total of just six characters. This sounds like some Pirandellian joke but is, in fact, a reflection of the current fashion for the one-person play. Admittedly Heretic Voices at London’s Arcola theatre offers a triple bill of solo shows: a prize-winning selection chosen by a judging panel, of which I was a member, from a shortlist of nine. Meanwhile, the Arcola’s smaller space houses Sam Potter’s Hanna, about a mum realising she has raised a child who is not hers. For good measure the Royal Court is staging Anoushka Warden’s acclaimed My Mum’s a Twat. All six plays, interestingly, are written by women and all six are fascinating. Yet they also raise important points about the pros and cons of one-person plays.



One advantage is obvious: at a time when money is tight, they are cheaper to stage. The solo show is also infinitely adaptable. It can offer a personal testament, a potted biography or a panoramic survey of an artist’s life and work as with Simon Callow’s surveys of Shakespeare and Dickens written, respectively, by Jonathan Bate and Peter Ackroyd.

It’s also a form that highlights the skills of the performer. One of my earliest memories is of seeing John Gielgud doing a Shakespeare anthology, The Ages of Man, that was like watching a musical maestro at work. At its best, the solo show is a kind of odyssey. The climactic piece in Heretic Voices is Tatty Hennessy’s A Hundred Words for Snow, an extraordinary story of a young girl’s determination to scatter her father’s ashes at the North Pole. Vividly performed by Lauren Samuels and beautifully staged by Max Gill, it leaps off the stage as it did off the page when I read it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Wickedly funny … Patsy Ferran in My Mum’s a Twat by Anoushka Warden. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

The stock argument against the one-person show is that it drains drama of conflict but that is not strictly true. In My Mum’s a Twat, there is a vital tussle between the youthful storyteller and the guru who persuades her mother to join a spiritual cult. But, much as I praised Warden’s wickedly funny portrait of the cult’s leader, it strikes me that the one-person show denies you a dual perspective. If this were a conventional drama, the actor playing the guru would be obliged to present the character from her own point of view: she might even play her as a woman of passionate conviction having to deal with a stroppy kid. Here, you see the character entirely through Warden’s eyes.

In the midst of this deluge of solo shows, I attended a rehearsed reading of a new Peter Gill play, Of New Things, dealing with the Catholic church’s involvement in political issues such as the London Dock strike of 1889. As the show played to an invited audience, I will withhold detailed comment. But one particular scene, in which a radical young cleric confronted a superior who accepted the status quo, neatly illustrated my point: you felt Gill was sympathetic to the young priest but, as a dramatist, was obliged to explore the senior figure’s belief that poverty, however regrettable, was part of the human condition.

“In a good play,” a German dramatist once said, “everyone is right.” However seductive and valuable the solo show – and given that there were 1,136 entries for the Heretic Voices competition, it clearly exerts a magnetic pull – I suspect it can never achieve the built-in ambivalence of the dialogue-based play.