Reasons You Should(n’t) Love Me, Kiln Theatre review: Masterful comedy about being single and disabled
Amy Trigg is a name we’ll be hearing from and seeing more prominently at the top of cast lists in the years to come. She won The Women’s Prize for Playwriting 2020 for this piece, her debut play, which has just been on a nationwide tour and now returns to the Kiln Theatre where it premiered in 2021.
Reasons has all of the pieces of the puzzle. Trigg is a natural talent as a writer and actor who manages to fill every minute of her show’s 80-minute runtime with interesting insight and humour. It’s in many ways a relatable one-woman show about navigating singledom and avoiding the pitfalls of toxic friends, competitiveness and boys who just want one thing. But then again, Trigg also narrates the pitfalls of spina bifida, a condition which affects the spine which Trigg and the show’s fictional character Juno both have. It means they’re both in a wheelchair and both spent much of their youth in hospital.
Trigg has an impecable talent for cracking a great joke to lighten the mood – before revealing incredibly dark truths about spina bfida. It shows how we feel we assimilate people in wheelchairs into society on one level, but are still ignorant to other daily pains they cannot so easily show. Early on, a seemingly confident Juno is riffing on the tribulations of youth and when she reveals she tried to throw herself out of her bedroom window aged eight due to the mental health difficulties that came with her condition.
She wheels left and right, offering an agular turn of her wheelchair for every comic or dramatic reveal, across a gorgeous set that’s covered in silver foil. Juno explains it’s a homemade version of a hospital scanning machine her family made for her as a child to help her not feel scared by big hospitals anymore.
It’s filled with insight we should all listen impeccably to. “Whenever anyone prays for me they never ask what I’d like them to pray for,” she says, adding that being able to walk again isn’t actually what she wants but what people presume she wants. Juno dishes on sex too – what she can feel and what she can’t, busting myths as she goes – and here lie some of the sassiest jokes. “I wanted to get it over and done with,” she says at one point: “And done I did get.”
But Trigg isn’t interested in lecturing anyone – Reasons You Should(n’t) Love Me’s cleverest serve is how tonally it tackles such serious issues in a fun and engaging way.
Reasons You Should(n’t) Love Me is at the Kiln Theatre until 26 November