5 – 9 September

In this two hander straight from the Edinburgh Fringe two women face up to the pressures within their own fields of finance and football.

Told through two contrasting but interlinked and increasingly intertwining stories Chanel Waddock is a goalkeeper about to break into the first team, while Shannon Hayes begins a career in banking keen to impress colleagues and peers.

Both women are on the verge of getting to the next level, although both are very different and face contrasting challenges. That is until they both find out that they are unexpectedly pregnant.

Bitter Lemons is winner of a Pleasance Edinburgh National Partnership Award and while the play can be seen as an ostensibly feminist critique, it is very much more than that.

Writer and director Lucy Hayes masterfully moves the narrative on between the two distinct women. The bouncing, animated Waddock prepares for her first game as the team’s number one goalkeeper, full of vim and dynamism while remembering her late dad secretly taking her to practice. Later, we learn more about those secrets.

Hayes is more cerebral and calculating. She has worked hard to break into a male dominated world and is determined not to fail. She moves in a measured way and glides rather than bounds about the stage, confident in her abilities.

The women remain nameless and do not interact with each other except at the end when they discover they share the same surnames.  

Design by Roisin Martindale is minimally effective. A modernist set of black and white squares allows the actors to navigate around the stage, almost like a pair of chess pieces as they take up positions to address us, the audience, in a blatantly direct manner.

Tension is handled well as Waddock’s goalkeeper has to confront not only her family background but a string of penalties in training, while Hayes’ banker faces challenge from a creepy boss, Gary and a desire to make her mum proud.

There are a lot of themes, perhaps too many, and the play covers a cornucopia of issues. Pregnancy, abortion, a woman’s ownership of her own body, race, patriarchy, disappointing lovers and loss of paternal contact are all here. This has a tendency to put a strain on the flow and towards the end I was unsure which messages I was to take away.

However the writing is flawlessly fluid and natural, and the quality of acting is beyond doubt. Both actors and director are graduates of Bristol Old Vic Theatre school, so enough said.

Bitter Lemons’ strength comes from the bristling dialogue and a marvellous synchronicity both in words and interchange between the two performers. Waddock has an innate ability to capture her character so completely that she is a joy to watch. Hayes’ rising anger surges to the surface when she loses her cool in a shockingly magnificent moment and hits out at the appalling Gary.

The play shows you that life can give you lemons, but not everything sucks.

★★★★☆  Bryan J Mason, 6th September 2023