Stacking

I WOULD have loved to see the look on writer/actor Katy Slater’s face when she first read Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. Her thoroughly engaging and delightful theatre miniatures seem to exist somewhere proximate to those tales of people with their own, singular take on reality.

On the surface, Slater’s heroine, Sandra, a supermarket shelf stacker recently promoted to cashier, is resolutely normal. But that normalcy has an unusual intensity. Sandra’s a borderline obsessive, it would seem, with maybe a touch of Asperger’s.

Then Sandra meets Des, and the oddest love affair takes root. They lunch in the staff canteen, Sandra doggedly colouring-in faces in the newspaper, Des counting the specks in the formica table top, trying to ignore the sounds of departing trains he knows will one day take him away from her.

Slater’s delightful 20-minute piece is a lesson in economy of writing and physical inflection. Some five minutes longer than her monologue last year from up a ladder, I’m hoping the annual increments start increasing soon and that I’m not going to be retired by the time I see this winning writer/performer in a full-length show.

Until 30 August.