21 Round for Christmas – Park Theatre

21 Round for Christmas gets off to a promising start. Into a realistically lived in Christmas kitchen set glides Tracey (Cathy Conneff), adorned in a tinsel boa and belting out a gutsy performance of Santa Baby. Tracey is frazzled – dealing with the various dietary demands of family members, including a vegan tart, a ham and a turkey and concerned about the gravy which usually falls to her friend Jackie. Conneff’s Tracey is chatty and familiar, if not entirely relatable; it’s an interesting cross between feeling like you’re gossiping with a friend and having that person at work talk at you about people from their life that you’ll never meet and frankly don’t care about. It’s all pretty safe territory, though – amusing gripes about picky family members, her irritating mother-in-law and characters from “The Shoes” (the local). If you can’t complain about your nearest and dearest at Christmas, then when can you, right? And so I settled back ready to enjoy what I was expecting to be a relatively entertaining monologue about family life, culminating in a bit of Christmas goodwill toward all mankind.

This was not to be, however, and I very quickly found myself feeling confused and not very entertained. Tracey’s monologue veers off in some unexpected directions that I can’t say I enjoyed. They were simultaneously not explored enough to be really strong standalone pieces but also the overall story felt a bit random and not very satisfying, and sadly none of it was amusing enough to my palate to make up for it. I’ve since learned that the piece was written by Matt Ballantyne and Toby Hampton as one of a series of monologues set in a different room of a house, and I can’t deny that I am probably swayed by the fact that I was really ready for a nice feel-good festive offering, but for me I’m afraid this fell a bit short of the mark.

There are positives here – Conneff is larger than life and does a great job of picking up a range of personas, the staging is smartly done and the multiple sound cues sailed through with relative ease. For me though, the writing was a disappointment and I would have welcomed either more mad-cap humour or a greater focus on the more poignant parts of Tracey’s story, adding up to a better understanding of her character and giving us that Christmas boost we all need right now when she comes to her conclusion.

Reviewer: Zoё Meeres

Reviewed: 11th December 2023

North West End UK Rating: