Sophie Willan: Novice Detective

Sophie Willan is a warm and charming performer, whose show recounts her character's search for her long-lost father. Delivered via film noir tropes, Willan adopts the hard-boiled detective persona amid moody lighting and a sleazy score. This is an interactive show, with an audience member as her sidekick, and others co-opted along the way. With a wealth of props and physical comedy, the labour is apparent.

But it's unclear what the intent of all this is. The show ends with a reflective monologue on the child's search for her father, but this is somewhat at odds with the tone that has preceded it, and the epiphany feels unearned. This is especially the case considering for much of the narrative Willan presumes her father is a particular, real-life famous person (I won't say who for fear of revealing a spoiler - though the revelation itself comes from nowhere and has little emotional heft). To leap from such knockabout fare to a poignant ending is confusingly jarring.

And for a show so dependent on audience interaction you'd expect a performer to be more clearly in charge of her participants. I began to feel sorry for her sidekick, repeatedly mocked for his failure to follow instructions, when it was unclear if such incompetence was intended to be part of the show or a genuinely unwelcome hindrance. Like the rest of the audience, he needed more clues to solve the mystery on offer here.