Not one for the shy and retiring audience member, Whoa Mama! is great fun at Camden Fringe 2024 at the Hen & Chickens Theatre
“Acting is my baby”
First, a public safety warning. Hold onto your hats and your drinks at Whoa Mama! for performer Stephanie Ware may well come barreling at the audience with scant regard for the bottles of wine in her way! It’s all fun and games though, in this fast and ferocious exploration of the difference between being childless and child-free, probing into our cultural obsession with the ticking of the biological clock.
Introducing herself as an actor (and director, and producer, and props master, and PR, and HR etc etc), Ware’s stage presence is undeniably gregarious but as she introduces her theme, there’s a distinct sense of how personal this material is, a reflection on the decisions she has made as a 40-something theatremaker as well as the societal pressures felt more widely by anyone who could procreate.
With the amusing assistance of her AI-assisted Magic 8 ball (ask again later…) to provide genres for her to play, Ware skips lightly through Greek tragedy, period drama, drag king, literal Vagina Monologues, courtroom thriller and TED talk with real freedom and fearlessness. She invites the audience into her world through speaking roles, sound department (hubbub hubbub ) and even some onstage action for the lucky, and she clearly relishes that interaction.
That does mean that Peta Lily’s production feels like it skirts the line between raucous and rough-edged at times, a level of chaos which is entertaining but sometimes obscures the depth of the material. At moments like the Mr and Mrs-esque gameshow, there’s such a powerful demonstration of the patriarchy at play and in the final spins of the Magic 8, a really moving and uplifting finale.
