Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath

Wish I Had A Sylvia Plath is not, repeat not, about Sylvia Plath. It is about American poet, housewife and mother Esther Greenwood, married to English poet and adulterer Ned Pughes. She does have a beloved dead father whose approval she needed, an overbearing mother whose interfering she doesn't need, and she does put her head in a gas oven. But I repeat: it is not about Sylvia Plath.

I don't, for instance, remember the talking oven featuring in Plath biographies, nor the time she
spent as hostess of a cheesy TV cookery programme. Of course we could be watching the visualisation of the final few hallucinatory moments in the mind of a woman driven to suicide by gas. We certainly could, which is what makes watching this one-woman show so genuinely painful and disturbing. The set and costumes are bright primary colours, the songs are Doris Day and Frank Sinatra and a great deal of the show is very funny. But Elisabeth Gray never allows you to laugh easily.

There is a magnificently exaggerated black and white film playing for much of the time, for which she provides all the voices. Much of this is hilarious, the first meeting at an Oxford party particularly so, but edges of desperation always undermine the laughs. As the end approaches, the mental instability becomes more and more uncomfortable to watch.

Watch it you should, though - the film makes it a one-woman show with a cast of dozens and Elisabeth Gray's performance is one of the very best on the Fringe.