One Day I'll go to Compostela

First devised and performed at the Avignon Fringe Festival in 2005, Marie Celine Lachaud’s One Day I’ll go to Compostela is a charming tale, told with punchy wit and verbal dexterity. The meandering monologue, which is littered with humourous and heart warming anecdotes, follows the trail of a French woman who, disappointed with the safe road she has taken in life, embarks on a spontaneous pilgrimage on foot to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, the site of one of Catholicism’s holiest cathedrals.

Un jour j’irai à Compostelle has enjoyed much success in Lachaud’s native France, having been performed over 200 times there to date. But while Dominic Legett’s English translation of the play maintains a lot of its original eloquence, some excellent lines are lost in Lachaud’s hurried, slightly uncertain delivery. The details of a particularly amusing scene in which Yorkshireman Jack—her companion and eventual lover—tries to demonstrate his weight loss by sticking his hand down his shorts, for instance, go either unheard or misunderstood by much of the audience.

This failure of comic timing is really the only thing that detracts from the carefree enjoyment of One Day I’ll go to Compostela, which is in the main a delightfully simple story of one woman’s quest for self confidence.