This review contains spoilers
Anyone who does a one person show at the fringe as my respect for having such audacious confidence. It’s something I doubt I could ever do. Nine Rose Carlin delivered her show Seeking Representation with unflappable poise and endearing sentiment. A tongue-in-cheek pity-party revisiting her days trying to make it as an actress in LA, she showcased her versatile acting skills, alongside her incredible, truly beautiful voice and American issued perfectly straight, perfectly white teeth. If this show was a coffee, it would be a vanilla-iced-latte. Beautifully beige, cloyingly millennial.
But at the Fringe and even pleasantly charming shows need a dramatic twist. For me, the final 10 minutes put a damper on an otherwise wonderfully average performance as she introduced a sci-fi twist that resulted in her own murder, at the hands of a Tesla AI bot. An out-of-the-box plot, yet it jarred with the rest of the show and left me wondering what the heck I had just seen.
I was keen to see the one-woman cabaret musical-comedy because it seemed so “Fringe”. How can you come to the festival and not see a wildly creative, slightly bewildering show? And this ultimately didn’t disappoint on the whole bewildering front, but perhaps not in a good way. This could have easily swung to a 5 star if she had committed to the eccentricity from the beginning.
At the end of the day, I have great admiration for a woman who can sing and dance with such confidence, in heels. She handled audience participation well, I feared potential cringe, but she smiled and enticed the crowd to help her, and it went smoothly – for which again I only have admiration. I only wish she hadn’t died in the end.
Nina Rose Carlin: Seeking Representation is on at 11:35 in The Space Surgeon’s Hall (Theatre 2) until 24 August
Buy tickets here.
Image via The Space press office.