“I am enjoying my own company.”
It is both an assertion and a defence when Maeva first says it. By the time The Waiting circles back to the phrase at its close, the words have acquired an entirely different weight. Nina-Lou Bricard’s one-woman show is at its best when it pulls off this kind of transformation, allowing something initially played for comedy to reveal a more complicated meaning once we understand the woman speaking.
Written and performed by Bricard and directed by Daisy Roe, The Waiting introduces us to Maeva, a wealthy young French former model who has fled her wedding and taken refuge in a pub, still dressed as a bride. She wants a drink, specifically a Sauvignon Blanc, and much of the early pleasure of the piece comes from watching Maeva turn the simple business of ordering one into a performance.
Language is one of Bricard’s sharpest tools. Maeva can pronounce “Sauvignon Blanc” in immaculate French before casually reducing it to a “savvy b.” When the unseen waiter tells her, “I love your accent,” it is another small, funny observation about how Maeva is perceived before anyone knows very much about her. Her Frenchness is charming, glamorous and immediately legible to the stranger serving her, while the play will spend the next hour complicating that first impression.
The movement between French and English is particularly well judged. Crucially, the production does not require every audience member to understand French for those passages to work. Bricard’s acting is raw and physically precise enough that intention surpasses translation. Tone, rhythm, gesture and emotional circumstance tell us what we need to know even when the individual words do not. Rather than interrupting our access to Maeva, the untranslated language becomes another means of accessing her. At certain points, understanding exactly what she feels matters more than understanding exactly what she says.
The comedy is strongest when it is equally specific. “It’s actually very French to kiss a dog” is a golden throwaway, delivered with the absolute conviction required to make the absurd seem perfectly reasonable. Maeva is funny because she rarely seems to realise quite how funny she is. Her privilege, vanity and social confidence could easily have made her exhausting company, but Bricard gives her enough unpredictability and vulnerability to make us want to remain in the pub with her.
That matters because The Waiting gradually reveals itself to be considerably darker than its opening suggests. Maeva’s stories begin to expose experiences of sexual violence and the mechanisms she has developed to live alongside them. The glamour and comic self-absorption begin to look less like the entirety of her character and more like part of the elaborate performance through which she controls what other people are allowed to see.
Bricard’s physical performance is particularly impressive. At one point, Maeva falls with such visceral force that the entire room held its breath. For an instant, the theatrical awareness that we are watching a performer execute rehearsed movement vanishes. The body hitting the ground simply looks real. It is an extraordinary piece of physical acting because its effectiveness comes from the apparent absence of technique, even though considerable technique is required to produce it safely and repeatedly. That achievement becomes more impressive when considered within the demands of the form. A one-person show is a mammoth undertaking for any performer. There is nowhere for Bricard to disappear for a scene, nobody else to take over the audience’s attention and no fellow actor physically present to provide the energy of an exchange. She has to sustain the rhythm of the entire production while simultaneously creating the impression of a world populated by people we never see.
Throughout, Bricard makes absent characters remarkably present. Maeva listens as much as she speaks, and changes in eyeline, posture, timing and reaction allow us to understand who has spoken and how their words have affected her without another performer supplying the other half of the scene. It is particularly important in a play so dependent on memory. Bricard is not simply delivering an extended monologue; she is continually recreating encounters and making the audience believe, for a moment, that someone else occupies the empty space. Her stamina is matched by the emotional demands of the material. Bricard has to move from broad comedy into increasingly exposed territory without making the darker material feel as though it belongs to a different play. The earlier humour is not discarded when Maeva’s experiences become more disturbing. Instead, our understanding of it changes.
This is where the production’s interest in control becomes most compelling. Maeva spends so much of The Waiting performing control. She controls her language, her image and the versions of events she chooses to offer us. Bricard, meanwhile, requires enormous technical control as a performer to make Maeva appear increasingly without it. The tension between those two things gives the production much of its power.
The play’s fragmented structure does occasionally make the route through Maeva’s memories harder to follow than it needs to be. Its digressions are psychologically appropriate for a woman circling experiences she cannot comfortably confront, but there are moments when the dramatic progression becomes less precise as a result. Fragmentation can tell us something about Maeva’s state of mind while still leaving individual sections wanting a clearer sense of what each new recollection has changed.
Yet the accumulation ultimately makes the return to the opening line effective. “I am enjoying my own company” sounded almost flippant when we first heard it. After spending the play discovering what Maeva has been carrying beneath the person she presents to the world, hearing her say it again feels different. The Waiting has not changed the words. It has changed the woman we understand to be saying them. Maeva arrives as someone determined to turn even catastrophe into an anecdote. By the end, the jokes have not disappeared and neither has the woman who made them. Instead, Bricard allows us to recognise how much work that performance of Maeva has been doing all along.