Review: Kirsty Mann: Skeletons at The Pleasure Garden

Kirsty Mann: Skeletons at The Little Palais at The Pleasure Garden
Wednesday, January 24, 2024

Kirsty Mann’s comedy show revolved around a big secret. For ten years, she lived a double life as a doctor and a performer, telling no one in either profession about the other. Skeletons unfolded loosely around a narrative of the build-up and eventual breakdown of her double life, ending in a big reveal to her best friend in the aftermath of the trauma of COVID.

She told the story through a series of scenes in which she played a cast of friends, colleagues, and hospital patients. Through these vignettes, she showed the audience how she tied herself in knots to keep her secret, with ridiculous results, like the time she turned up on stage straight from the hospital without realising she was still covered in blood.

She also showed some of the ways that the people around her signalled that being both a comedian and a doctor would not be okay. There was the posh playwright who thought she was too unfocused by being both a comedian and an actress, and there was the struggle to be taken seriously in the hospital, where patients repeatedly assumed she was their nurse. This went some way towards explaining her decisions to keep up the double life, but ultimately, the lengths she went to for so long were baffling.

At the heart of the story was her relationship with her best friend, a wild, accident-prone gay Irishman. With his exuberant, haphazard quest for self-improvement, he served as a foil for her closeted existence and her fear of revealing her true self to those she loved for fear of their reactions. Her inability to be open with him was a regret she returned to again and again.

Skeletons was a performance with heart, and Mann is extremely warm and likeable on stage. Not all of the elements were completely successful; she touched on her traumatic experiences during COVID in a London hospital but didn’t go deep enough to make the audience really feel it, nor could she bring herself to exploit it for laughs. However, she couldn’t leave it out, because that was the experience that ultimately showed her that life is too short to care so much what other people think.

Mann spent ten years performing comedy without being able to use any of her medical experiences as material. Now that she has allowed herself, audiences should look forward to more operating theatre comedy, which will only get more polished in years to come.

SAMANTHA ROSENFELD