Last Christmas

A tacky, twinkly Christmas tree sparkles away next to a man. He looks at us forlornly and launches into a monologue. In Last Christmas, playwright Matthew Bulgo shows a man struggling to clarify his identity in the wake of a family tragedy. There are a few cracks in the text itself, but an engaging performance from Sion Pritchard deftly covers them over.

Working a nine-to-five office job, Tom’s life isn’t going exactly the way he’d planned. A bit of reading has made him reconsider some choices he’s made, and on a trip back to his home town of Swansea he realises he hasn’t escaped as much as he’d hoped. In the tradition of many monologues, information is drip-fed to manufacture plot twists and emotional responses.

It’s not that Last Christmas isn’t tight and well-executed. Just that we’ve seen these kind of solo shows before: a person has gone through some kind of trauma which causes him to reassess things and lash out from time-to-time. The main problem here is that Tom isn’t pushed far enough, so the events are sometimes a little banal.

Pritchard gives some gravity and humour to the text, however, and skips along at a healthy pace. He manages to be performative without ever being fake, and tells the whole tale with all the likeability of a mate over a pint. This is a story of broken and shifting masculinity, and he treads that line perfectly.