No one could accuse Sadie Frost of not being game. The recent theatrical adventures of the former Mrs Jude Law have hardly worried awards committees and if ever a play didn’t require a sequel it was her 2009 one-woman vehicle, Touched for the Very First Time.
Yet here she is back again as lonely Madonna fan Lesley.
First Time was not a beacon of profundity, but at least it cast a logical eye over the travails of teenage Lesley, as she discovered the wonders of Madge and vowed to live her life according to the diktats of the Material Girl.
Here, the timeline dashes frantically from 2009 to 1984 and all points in between in the space of 11 mini-scenes in just 55 minutes. Lesley aimed high — and gained an ill-defined career — but has ended up single, lonely and 38. Hence the startling first line: “I’m in Sweden and I’m waiting to be inseminated.”
Frost is a willing if limited performer, whose default delivery setting is to stare fixedly into the middle distance. She’s rarely on the stage, which is given over to a superfluous singer and pianist, but, like a pretty pixie, pops up in all corners of the sweaty cabaret space in James Phillips’s production.
This work rate can’t hide the fact that writer Zoe Lewis has given her almost nothing to work with. The increasingly tenuous Madonna link becomes a ball and chain around Frost’s stilettos: why should an intelligent woman continue to be so influenced by her idol’s contradictory lifestyle choices?
Lewis is striving to say something wittily profound about post-feminism in the manner of Bridget Jones, but has come up with a pile of big pants.
Until June 9 (020 7478 0100, sohotheatre.com)
