Laura Solon: Rabbit Faced Story Soup

Solon’s 2010 show Rabbit Faced Story Soup is an exhaustively inventive one-woman play set in a publishing house. She breaks and rebuilds the fourth wall as she switches seamlessly between plot and narration and from one hysterically neurotic character to the next. Most memorable is the Malcolm Tucker-esque literary agent Marcy whose every line is endlessly quotable. Nothing escapes Solon’s skewer; ambition, mediocrity, self-delusion, self-effacingess.

So densely packed is it that if the audience don’t laugh at a line, it’s because they’re still wheezing from its predecessor. However best lines are the more surreal intellectual ones that goad only a wry smile versus the choking and blushing her more callous jokes impel. The show is at times difficult to follow and borrows the odd line and character from Solon’s radio show Talking and Not Talking, but her sheer astonishing versatility leaves the audience in awe.