Eve is 31. Her aunt’s just died, she’s working in telesales in ‘a shipping container in a carpark’ and she’s never been more than 20 miles outside of Wolverhampton on her own. But then her boss has offers her a promotion – in London, and she leaves her family, boyfriend, and pet cat Steve Bull (named for the Wolverhampton Wanderers player) behind as she embarks for life in the city.
It starts well. The swanky city office has beanbags and a Nespresso(!) machine, her colleagues are fun and someone even offers her cocaine (she turns it down, but only after insisting, ‘thank you so much for thinking of me!’).
But soon the smog of the city descends; her flat is a ‘shithole’, her boyfriend is too busy looking after the cat and it’s UTI to visit, and the lure of the Midlands becomes nearly too much to bear. But the discovery of a letter addressed to the former tenant, none other than German-born, Irish actor Michael Fassbender, triggers a compulsive desire to reunite it with its intended recipient (and an extensive Google search marathon).
Performed by Lydia Larson, Finding Fassbender is a one-woman show which explores a millennial's move from the Midlands via the occasionally absurd vehicle of a celebrity obsession. It is easy for one-person shows to drift into lacklustre monologues, with the actor talking at the audience as they struggling to maintain full attention. But Larson’s captivating adoption of multiple personas and skilful navigation of a range of accents, from German and Irish to the Yam Yam lilt of her parents, made it all-too-easy to forget that there was only one person on stage.
While a play centred around one woman's unhappy obsession could make for uncomfortable viewing, Finding Fassbender adeptly captures the idiosyncrasies which make – and endear us to - a person, whether they are attractive traits or not. The illogical yet endearing texting habits of parents (“All the best David, brackets ‘Dad’”) are frequently invoked when texts are ‘read out’ to the audience. Such conversational delivery has the feeling of a story regaled at the pub amongst close friends - and elicited a lot of genuine laughter from the audience - yet is able to be confessional and deeply emotive.
Larson wittily confronts the obligatory pull of London, and the feeling that you need to have lived in the capital at least once to have really ‘lived’. While Eve’s search for Fassbender serves as the thrust of the show, the desire to reunite letter with actor becomes the means to examine the price - and value - of leaving the only place you’ve ever known.
Finding Fassbender follows an occasionally absurd but consistently funny route to explore the multitudes we all contain: as Eve says, ‘I am lots of things, I am’.
Finding Fassbender is being performed 4th– 12th, 14th– 27th August, at 11.45am, Pleasance Courtyard (Pleasance This).
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