It’s hard to categorise this show, but it’s essentially a piece of stand up combined with a lot of clowning.  The clowning animates an hour-long monologue that circles the issues raised by an obsession, in this case getting married before your twenty-seventh birthday.

There are a number of sketches – narrative moments which take us to a ball, a lunatic asylum and the house of an aged aunt.  Jane Austen is invoked along the way, of course, but so is Fleabag, the intention being to show the continuity of the central issue over two hundred years.  Love Island is not referenced, probably due to copyright issues. Depth and range are added to the stories by the use of black and white film clips shown on the backdrop which are punctuated by ironic remarks.  There are a lot of asides and a lot of audience participation, with one hapless individual being invited on stage to play a prospective suitor. (He told a good joke.)

The monologuer, comedian Rosaline Minnitt, is energetic and friendly.  She has an appropriate repertoire of facial expressions, and she flips her tones of voice easily.  She can sing and project and imitate accents.  She is confident of her material, throwing everything bar the kitchen sink at her subject.  There is no let-up, but she wins over her audience completely.  I was pleased that in all the verbal torrent there is only one expletive which could have been deleted.

Personally, I was interested and amused rather than blown away.  Still, credit where credit is due.  Most members of a Saturday night audience at Theatr Clwyd are the ‘wrong’ side of 40 and you might have expected them to be staid and unresponsive but Minnitt got on the right side of them/us straightaway.  Everyone sang a bit and we waved little electric lights in the air on cue  One of the high points of the evening was an audience member’s rendition of a screech owl’s call.

Not being either overwhelmed or partisan, I was well placed to appreciate how much effort had been put into the show by ensuring the incomprehensible storylines stayed on a crazy track.  The technical back up was efficient.  Lighting and sound effects happened – apparently – on time and the film clips ran smoothly (things like that have a habit of going wrong on the night).

In the end, the stage was left in a mess, with Clementine’s dolly figures of her parents and 67 sisters mixed up with the scores of love/hate letters that fluttered down at one point, but despite everything she had been doing for an hour, Minnitt still looked fresh and up for her next performance.  I’d be curious to see what she and Liebenspiel do get up to next.  It would be nice to see her working with or off another performer or two and -tackling a subject a tiny bit more – demanding?  Just a suggestion.