A show about taking risks – that takes no risks
Playing on the final night of the Student Theatre at Glasgow’s New Works Festival 2025, Jilted is a twenty-minute comedy taking place in the immediate aftermath of a bride, Stacey, leaving her groom at the altar. Thrown into this are her friends and bridesmaids, Carrie and Margaret.
Written by Sofia Macchi Watts, Jilted grapples with what it means to turn thirty as a woman. What are the pressures? The expectations? What do you hope to have achieved by then? What can you hope to achieve afterwards? How old is it to be thirty, anyway?
It’s an endeavour that doesn’t quite succeed. With the typically sparse set of student plays – there’s a sofa and a telephone, just about – the characters have no place to hide. Under the unwavering lights, they play very defined roles: Carrie is fun, Margaret is sensible, and Stacey is strung-up. The outlines around their roles are, like in a crime scene, clearly drawn – and like in a crime scene, they don’t move outside of those lines.
This restrictiveness doesn’t aid the actors, who try gamely to make the most of it. In particular, Angeline Cochrane-Brown, playing Carrie, has good comic timing and her expressions of unreserved delight are a delight in themselves. She even earns the loudest laughs with a bobblehead impression. With not much else to do though, she repeats the trick a few times to diminishing returns.
The best section of the play also involves Brown. Halfway through, Stacey decides to give her groom another chance, leaving Carrie and Margaret alone. They bicker, like only the closest friends can do, calling each other names and demanding apologies, giving apologies and demanding more apologies. The interaction has dynamism, and the words flow in natural cascades. It’s well-written, and you get the feeling it’s because it speaks the truest to the creative team.
You also get the feeling the creative team could’ve been bolder by focusing on just the bridesmaids and removing Stacey entirely. The writing for Stacey is Jilted at its weakest. Burdened with being the emotional core, she is the one turning thirty and getting married and having her dreams realised – until she realises her dreams are nightmares. It’s unfortunate, then, that her dialogue is clichéd, trotting out well-worn fears of ageing, the weight of planning out her forever, and regrets of wasted youth. Presented without real examination, the character doesn’t add much except words without meaning – they haven’t been earned because they don’t feel lived.
While Jilted is supposed to be light-hearted, there exists a cynical edge that the creative team seemingly weren’t willing to acknowledge or explore. There’s a fantastic piece of acting by Sophie Gattis, playing Stacey, as she tries to get Margaret to go along with her impromptu plan to toss everything up into the air and live out their adolescent dreams of skinny-dipping in the Trevi Fountain. Having prevaricated throughout the play on whether she should marry her fiancé, she seems finally resolute in her choice to ditch everything. But even as her voice begs Margaret to say yes, her face, red and strained, belies the hard reality of this fantasy.
The moment passes, though, and they instead elatedly dance off the stage. Jilted prefers the comfort of the fantasy. It wants to be a triumph of sisterhood embracing the adventure of ageing by going on an adventure together. But you cannot help but wonder when their faces, like Benjamin Braddock’s and Elaine Robinson’s before them, will have their smiles washed off – on the train to the Fountain? on the plane to Rome? or on the bus to the airport?