Emmeline Downie: Gail comedy review – Beyond the façade
Emmeline Downie becomes a middle-aged Milton Keynes resident in a character comedy that reflects on the underlying loneliness beneath a chirpy persona
Gail from Milton Keynes spins a lot of plates. She’s a mother, the owner of a slogan T-shirt empire, a Women’s Weekly reader and now a nearly qualified life coach. And boy does she have a lot of top tips, tricks and tenuous acronyms to share. In this tale of two halves, Emmeline Downie triumphantly creates a larger-than-life character who elicits a lot of laughs but also reflects a larger epidemic of societal isolation and loneliness. Sure, we’re mostly laughing at the 54-year-old as she airs some problematic views and brags about her incredibly ‘rich and fulfilled’ life, but Downie masterfully allows us to see through her veil of deception without ever dropping her guard completely.
Another dimension of this semi-political satire is that Downie (and her director Leo Reich) are both in their 20s. It’s a point of view that has the potential to observe Gail from a place of judgement or moral superiority but instead there’s real tenderness and pathos in Downie’s script that allows for nuance and, ultimately, resonance. This is a woman we all know in some capacity, which means in cracking Gail, Downie opens up something in all of us.
Emmeline Downie: Gail, Pleasance Courtyard, until 30 August, 4.35pm; picture: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan.