Review: Sian Davies: Band of Gold

Sian Davies | Photo by Andy Hollingworth

How Sian Davies came to find her own face tattooed onto a stranger's midriff is only the most bizarre strand in this patchily linked but drolly delivered hour about where she finds herself in life. Essentially driven by the ongoing fallout of her familial legacy of mental health issues and, more impactfully, her divorce seven years ago, it's fair to say that the break-up still truly impinges on the comic, not least as she grudgingly took custody of the dog after the split. If her love-hate relationship with this canine afford the otherwise dryly cynical Band of Gold its heart, Davies nevertheless amusingly frames it via her suspicions about the dog's political leanings, the antennae of her class consciousness forever twitching. Elsewhere, she muses on body art as a signifier of status and aspirations, but chiefly, youthful folly and regrets, an ever-present link to a past she can't fully put behind her. And why should she? Revelations about the limits of adultery in the eyes of the law seem a staggering injustice and equality loophole that she incredulously dissects for all its worth, while elsewhere she's wryly witty about the limits of middle-class allergy remedies when you live in a deprived inner city. Righteously pugnacious, especially for her socialist ideals, Davies nevertheless has a healthy sense of her own ridiculousness and is an increasingly ambitious storyteller.