Amanda Wilkin’s Shedding a Skin premiered at London’s Soho Theatre a couple of years ago.  It’s now playing at Buddies in Bad Times in a Nightwood Theatre production directed by Cherissa Richards.  It’s a one woman show about a young woman escaping from corporate Hell and her boat dwelling boyfriend and discovering herself.  It’s set in contemporary London and Myah is black and very, very middle class; the daughter of successful immigrants with, as they tend to, ambitions for their children which Myah isn’t really living up to.

And if you are young, female, black, very, very middle class but not as successful as Rishi Sunak who the hell are you?  The play is about Myah’s attempt to find out through her relationship with an older Jamaican woman with an activist past and a young aggressively black colleague who’s sticking it to the man.  It’s laid out as a series of exquisitely crafted vignettes that explore many themes; the absurdity of corporate life especially where it comes to Diversity (capital D), what where you shop for groceries says about you, how where you live defines you (if Toronto is a city of neighbourhoods, London is a city of ghettoes).  It’s written with enormous subtlety with every nuance of race and class articulated with great clarity.

All that said, it wouldn’t work without a really good performer and Vanessa Sears is just about perfect.  Her Myah looks and sounds exactly like a very well brought up young woman who went to a decent university (but not a really good one!) and isn’t too sure of herself.  She’s alternately moving and hilarious when she’s portraying other characters; her (male, of course) gung-ho corporate drone boss (the type who gets into management because he can flawlessly parrot whatever crap drips down from the executive suite), feisty Mildred; a tough as nails Jamaican woman who survived the really tough years, or her blinged up, street smart younger colleague.  Her body language and accents are just spot on.  It’s a tour de force.  She’s surely going to make you laugh and might just make you cry too.

The staging is quite clever.  Most of the action takes place in a cube (what else?) at centre stage with projections around it.  Over the course of the 90 minutes Myah gradually opens out the wings and the ceiling creating additional space.  Lighting and sound design are relatively unobtrusive but effective enough.  But this show really is about writing and acting not stagecraft.  And, I’ll say it again, the writing and acting are first rate.

Shedding a Skin runs at Buddies in Bad Times until May 4th.

Photo credits: Jeremy Mimnagh