Kathryn Griffiths is quite clearly a wonderful woman. I know this because a friend of mine by the name of Sebastian Funk recently received a message from her, telling him that he had one of the top 50 names out of the 18,000 at Cambridge, at that for this reason he should probably come and see her new show, Fierce, which she had written and would be performing by herself. It tells you a lot about her dedication that she is willing to trawl through an 18,000 strong database on the hunt for 50 cool names. It also might tell you something of the quirky sense of humour of the show itself that it could be marketed in such a way.

Usually I can find quirkiness or kookiness a little grating in large doses. This play certainly has a lot of both. Sample lines might include “why is McDonalds in McDonalds at 6am?” or a deconstruction of the movie Deep Blue Sea (“They made the sharks massive and intelligent, because they were trying to cure cancer, of course”). And yet each one-liner struck home with such a charming delivery and such well-wrought wit that I couldn’t begrudge the tone of the show too much. It helped that the play had some heart buried somewhere amongst the oddness.

The play is the recollection of Felicity, who at the age of 15 runs away from home and falls in love with an older female artist, who lives in some squalor with her Australian flatmate. Felicity ends up tied to a bed, for reasons too odd to go into. That is, in essence, the plot, and it just about is enough to hang a play on. There is much of the tenderness of young infatuation here, of trying to clumsily sort out one’s confused sexuality, suggesting that to reach a first kiss they should run at each other still talking until their mouths meet. There is a fascinating power dynamic, Griffiths smoothly jumping from one character to the other, the utterly straight-played Felicity and the older, stranger, more neurotic American who feels both attraction and fear at the advances of her young suitor. The switch between accents and physicalities is masterful and subtle, with Griffiths never letting her obvious comic abilities run away with her and detracting from the tenderness of her portrayals.

She moves across the stage with comfort and grace, with an easy, friendly rapport with the audience. She forgot a single line of the play, so endearingly it actually made for a better evening, trying to remember it in character before asking the auditorium in general what it was, to be reminded by the sound box. It was the most majestic flub I have ever seen.

It is an ambitious piece of writing, for which I give her credit, but I had my reservations. While I am fine with theatre that doesn’t wear its themes on its sleeve, at times I found myself struggling to follow the point of a vignette; there were times when the story lost a sense of why it needed to be told. The immense awkwardness and weirdness of the characters lost my patience once or twice, and the end came slightly too abruptly to justify itself. I fully commend the attempt to write in a bordering-on-absurdist manner, but it contains structural pitfalls which are not overcome here. But it is a laudable and brave attempt, very funny, and, because clichés are clichés for a reason, I may as well say it: a tour de force from the woman herself.