Waiting for Stanley

The year is 1945, the war is over and a beautiful red-nosed clown (Leela Bunce) waits eagerly at a bunting-covered station, a banner in her hands lovingly embroidered with the words 'Welcome Home Stanley.' As you may guess, Stanley isn't on the train.

What starts out as a simple premise blossoms into an exquisitely realised ode to the women of World War II, a one-woman homage to the mothers who watched their babies grow into children who had never met their fathers, only to see them evacuated to the countryside; the women who rode motorcycles, worked shifts, kept their chins up and all the time waited for a husband who may or may not come home.

With endearing warmth and beguilingly subtle humour Bunce conjures up scenarios where Stanley has run off with a sultry French woman, imagines his war heroics in the field and pictures him as a tiny mechanical puppet writing her letters about his socks. Her stage craft is as ingenious as any you'll find at the Fringe but it is the depth of pride and hope she finds in her clown persona that has us rooting for her from the bottom of our hearts.

Just as people in times of war have to find unique solutions to problems, so do clowns, and in this sense Bunce has found the perfect medium to honour both the terrible pain and the uplifting spirit of war wives. It's a little embarrassing to admit that a clown show made me cry, but in this case it was for all the right reasons.