Red Bus Londinium Life

Spin Cycles, now at Camden People’s Theatre after successful runs at the Edinburgh Fringe and The Baxter Studio in Cape Town, is an honest, open and funny one-woman show that at times sneaks up on you emotionally. It unfolds in a setting that feels ripe for satire: a boutique spin studio full of Lycra, slogans and forced togetherness. From the off, it is clear this will poke fun at wellness culture, but it is also about what we carry into those spaces with us and why we go looking for them in the first place.

Directed by Larica Schnell and written and performed by Jamie-Lee Money, the show sits at the crossroads of thirties angst, family trauma and the strange comfort, and discomfort, of communal exercise. Money has said the piece grew out of her mother’s breast cancer diagnosis and the anticipatory grief that followed.

The central character, Lolly, is a South African journalist living in London, sent to review a cult-like spin studio for a wellness magazine. As each class unfolds, and as she pedals furiously to the playlist, her attempts to process her mother’s illness back home slowly surface, often catching both her and the audience off guard.

Money is clear that Lolly is not a stand-in for herself and the show has a lot of fun proving it. Lolly drinks too much, lusts after the office junior and spends a surprising amount of time wondering whether anyone who lives in East London should really be commuting west at all, unless a Hugh Grant style romantic entanglement is on offer. There is a definite sense that she is channelling two of his films here: Notting Hill, with the spin studio perhaps slyly taking the place of “the” bookstore, and Bridget Jones’s Diary, where Lolly emerges as a similarly hapless singleton trying to get her adult life on track.

Using humour and physicality, Spin Cycles takes on some proper gut-punch topics, but it never feels heavy or claustrophobic. Instead, it is alive and sweaty, awkward in a very human way and often unexpectedly generous. It is the kind of show that makes you laugh first, wince shortly afterwards and then keep turning it over in your head on the way home.

There are moments when the show feels slightly overburdened with stories. The account of Lolly’s friend’s passing is, if autobiographical, genuinely heart-breaking, and it feels almost callous to suggest that it might dilute the impact of the wider piece. Even so, it does shift the focus away from the universality of the original premise. Many Londoners live at a distance from the love and safety of home, settling here when their parents are hale and hearty and only fully registering that distance when vulnerability sets in, dreading the phone call that brings news which can never be unheard. Spin Cycles is at its strongest when it taps into this shared experience of becoming adults just as our elders begin to grow old.

Money said in a recent interview for Beyond the Curtain that she hopes everyone in the audience is able to say ‘yeah I’ve been there’, or ‘huh, I’ve felt that’. In this, her debut play is a clear success. Her energetic performance and hugely personal script mean that everyone will see elements of their own lives on her stage.

[Thank you to Chloé Nelkin Consulting for gifted tickets for an honest review].