Review: Main Character Energy, The Weston Studio, Bristol Old Vic – ‘Wilkey has the audience fully behind her and leaves bathed in applause’

Do you have ‘main character energy’, that force which radiates supreme self-assurance as though you have just arrived straight out of a film or a book? Temi Wilkey, a writer for the TV sitcom Sex Education believes she has it.

Arriving in Bristol with her 2024 Edinburgh Fringe show Main Character Energy, she makes it clear from her first appearance on stage that she wants more. In fact, she demands more. She really needs more. Or is it all an act?

Dressed in a hot pink flimsy two piece and white fluffy slippers, Wilkey uses the timeless concept of a one-woman show to tell an autobiographical story. This comprises a series of skits, some purely chronological, others flights of fancy, and along with a few Shakespearean monologues leads to a final acclamation of Wilkey the artist.

Directed by Ragevan Vasan and produced by Bobby Harding, the show features a sparse set with one microphone stand, a small dais doubling as a makeup box and some snappy lighting changes.

It doesn’t need anything else because the stage is more than filled with Wilkey. She tells us she was born to be on stage. Her doctor parents didn’t think so, but then she was never the focal point of their own energies, which were more targeted towards their careers.

Instead, she had to battle a childhood hernia (incurred carrying less talented kids in the school play) before she embarked on her own career in show business.

The resulting hour is filled with a charged morphing between narrative, physical comedy, interpretative dance, audience interaction, and angry tirades against whoever was preventing her from fulfilling her dream.

Although the show is ostensibly a standard solo show, the parody soon becomes apparent and much of the message is delivered tongue in cheek. Wilkey references her obvious beauty, only to later admit that her body has started to resemble those of her full bellied aunts.

When she dances for the audience, she demands total attention, picking up individual members for not giving her their full concentration, accusing one of blinking, which in her eyes is tantamount to racism.

There are several references to race, and often through a satirical lens. It will be interesting to see whether the reaction is different when the show runs with a BLACK OUT night on Thursday when black-identifying audience members are encouraged to attend.

Although billed as a “high camp cocktail of comedy and cabaret” I expected Main Character Energy to be a more radical show and would have liked it to push against the orthodox a little more.

But indisputably, Wilkey emerges from the telling with the audience fully behind her. She has a genuine warmth of personality that benefits from her dipping into her insecurity and self-deprecation.

Ultimately, we learn that she wants to be watched, noticed and loved, and when the audience willingly become a cohort of admirers, she finally leaves the stage, bathed in applause.

 

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Main Character Energy is at The Weston Studio, Bristol Old Vic on October 6-11 at 8pm (6.30pm Early Evening Performance on Wednesday; Black Out Night on Thursday, with post-show Q&A hosted by Travis Alabanza. Tickets are available at www.bristololdvic.org.uk.

All photos: Stephanie Sian Smith

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