In many ways Happy Tea shouldn’t work. As a piece of performance there’s all manner of technical reasons to mark this down. An hour’s monologue, delivered from a single spot, predominantly in a single tone of voice, largely with a single energy level, with a single tea-based metaphor that adds singularly little to the narrative. A few gentle jokes leaven the narrative, but they are more delivered than performed, with little thought given to measuring the beats so they land with effect.
One could kindly put this down to the rather small audience to which Jennifer Jane plays tonight. But I don’t think that’s it. Indeed, there’s credit to Jane for ploughing ahead, which I think gives more of a clue to why this sort of works. Put simply, Jennifer Jane is an extraordinary person telling an extraordinary story. This no-frills approach means there’s very little between us and a person with a core of pure steel.
I won’t give the story away, beyond the headlines: a shit of an ex-boyfriend, horrendously (really, unimaginably) injured in an encounter with a high voltage bear in Montana; superhuman levels of self-sacrifice that somehow feels completely rational; a very literal climax that helps understand why the right focus for this particular narrative is on this particular narrator.
It’s a story that doesn’t need to be dramatised to be dramatic, nor does it need to be rip roaringly funny for Jane’s matter of fact take to be unique. In delivering this as a low key mostly-the-facts-ma’m monologue, she might just have found the right package for the right person to tell an amazing story.
Jennifer Jane: Happy Tea, Just the Tonic at the Mash House, until 30 Aug (not 18), 7.15pm