Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath

Ethel is an unhappy woman: you can tell because she's got her head in the oven. But then the oven starts speaking to her, through a series of whoops only she can understand, and she reveals the reasons for her sadness.

Through a mixture of 1950's domestic goddess-style cookery programmes and flashback footage on a big screen, Ethel puts together the recipe for suicide. First comes her marriage to Ned Hughes, charismatic English poet. He is the first ingredient, an adulterous husband that "will require some preparation." Happily, she's done that already, starting with a bizarre film of their meeting at an intellectual party at Oxford and biting each others' cheeks and faces. Then comes a dismissive father, an all-American mother and children who love their father more. Altogether, what seem like a million small faliures and shortcomings add up to create a frightening parable of what happens if you expect too much from life.

While Elisabeth Gray's depiction of madness is surreal and unrelenting, she is terribly touching and fragile on stage. Everything in the production rests on her, and she bears the weight admirably. One only has to look around Edinburgh in August to see many faliures of the comedy-tragedy mix, but Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath pitches itself just right, with the jokes making the experience all the more affecting rather than detracting from it. The surreal nature of the prodcution emphasises that this is how the unfortunate Ethel sees the world, until even the audience understand her reasons for suicide perfectly.