Millennial anxieties are unpacked and explored in devised comedy I’ll Have What She’s Having. Written and performed by Jess Brodie and Victoria Bianchi, two women who live completely different lives and fake their own happiness around each other. However, powerful envy haunts them both. Music, dance and spoken word all contribute to a varied yet disjointed show about the 21st century female experience.
This show is fun and relatable, but it could be so much more.
It is unfortunate that most of the performance is based around monologues since these are not particularly compelling. Brodie and Bianchi convey deeply personal anxieties that are buried within society, but their speeches lack any kind of intimacy in their delivery. In general, their words sound recited rather than emotionally expressed. The actors occasionally switch into different roles, but with limited variation in their performances, this adds little.
Moments of the writing are powerful. A scene involving numbers and measurements written over the body in felt tip effectively highlights the markers with which we are too often defined. Some of the dialogue between Brodie and Bianchi involves each of them turning away to reveal their true thoughts on the conversation, which brought great amusement amongst the audience. However, other segments are so random that it’s difficult to see their purpose. A ‘party scene’ involving shot glasses felt disconnected to the performance. The meaning behind the banana references that are interspersed throughout the show is eventually explained, but not before we’ve spent most of the show wondering what on earth they’re meant to signify, if not just a sexual joke.
I’ll Have What She’s Having does manage to communicate its overarching message: that we all compare ourselves to each other no matter what stage we’re at in life. The pressures extending from how we define success are thoroughly scrutinised throughout. However, the emotion behind the performance fails to reach the auditorium. This show is fun and relatable, but it could be so much more.
