VAULT Festival 11 – 16 February 2020
Reviewed by Claire Roderick
4****
The third part of Katie Arnstein’s It’s A Girl! trilogy is another corker of a show. (All 3 shows are playing on the 16th)
Although still in development, Sticky Door is already a slick, intelligent and funny production. Einstein’s relaxed and anecdotal style almost makes the audience forget they’re watching theatre rather than sharing war stories with a mate. After a pre-Christmas breakup, Arnstein shares her 2014 plan – a man a month, without getting attached or staying with them out of habit. With no agent and struggling to find acting jobs, Katie shares a flat above a Brixton chicken shop “le Palais de Poulet” as her flatmate calls it and works in a Chinese restaurant. Her methods of finding suitable dates are related in hilarious fashion, and if each month’s encounter was told in equal detail, this show would be a marathon, but probably well worth sitting through. A few months are skipped through in a musical montage until we get to the summer, where glimpses of Katie’s mental health struggles trickle through, before becoming a paragliding deluge. The change in body language and breakup of the rhythm of the storytelling convey the emotional exhaustion brilliantly.
With a clever eye for detail and some wonderful quips, Arnstein’s writing engages the audience instantly, and her charming and charismatic performance is outstanding. Arnstein’s analysis of why her depression developed and the support of her friends is brutally honest, and the final call to arms for us to fight the sexism and prejudice in society, and to remember that we deserve better is full of hopeful inspiration. Get down to the Vaults and see this wonderful show for lots of laughs, a few tears and rhubarb and custards.