Review: Good For Her!, The Other Palace ★★★

When your ugliest thoughts get a stage of their own

There’s a version of ourselves most of us keep out of sight: the one who resents a friend’s success, who checks a rival’s life for signs of failure, who wants care from a parent and gets something closer to competition instead. Good For Her! puts that version on stage for 75 minutes and asks us to sit with her. Iris (Mollie Semple) is a stalled actress caring for her mother as her health declines, a mother whose narcissism, we gather fairly quickly, shaped Iris long before the illness did. If the show has a thesis, it’s this: exposed to daylight, most of our ugliest inner thoughts would make us fairly unlikeable too.

Semple performs the whole thing alone and her authenticity in the role means that it’s easy to forget where Mollie ends and Iris begins. Her mother exists only as a voiceover, and the impatience in Iris’s responses to her, even while she’s meant to be the one doing the caring, comes through clearly. That’s a difficult note to hit consistently across a solo hour, and Semple hits it in a way which is not always comfortable.

The show is at its best in its nastiest moments. There’s a scene where Iris stalks a former schoolmate to a café, and it’s genuinely cringing to watch in the way good discomfort should be; you feel caught out on her behalf, which is presumably the point. It’s the clearest example in the whole piece of that “hidden self” idea actually working: we wince because some part of us recognises the impulse.

Where it’s harder going is simply spending time with Iris herself. She’s self-absorbed, and the show carries that off as comedy well enough in parts, but it doesn’t always make you want to stay in her company. To be fair, the production gives reasons: a childhood short on praise, and a career built on constantly putting yourself up for judgement. I understood why Iris is the way she is. I’m just not convinced I ever wanted her to come right, and a solo show like this one depends quite heavily on the audience wanting to make that journey with her.

Staging stays out of the way, correctly. The set does its job without trying to do more than that, and the sound design, particularly as other characters in Iris’s life , works well throughout. Video and projection appear as search terms surfacing, a way of showing us the inside of Iris’s head without a second performer ever appearing.

The ending didn’t quite work. It’s built towards a moment clearly designed to have the audience applauding along with Iris, but it landed slightly flat on the night.

Good for her! would best suit someone who’s more interested in what parenting does to the adults it produces than in whether they like the person telling the story, a viewpoint Semple displays with courage.

[Thank you to Chloe Nelkin for a gifted ticket for an honest review].

Read our interview with Molly Semple here: https://redbuslondinium.uk/2026/07/11/mollie-semple-turns-comparison-culture-into-live-chaos/

Photo credit: Malachy Luckie

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