Review: Spinster at the Unity Theatre ***1/2

One of the key elements of the Unity’s annual Up Next Festival is the disparate range of work on show over one busy four-day period.

That packed programme reached its zenith with a trio of double bills on Friday evening, mixing and matching six short pieces, from ‘architects of the absurd’ to a dark comedy exploring the background of the pandemic to a cabaret in the middle of a compost heap.

First out of the starting blocks in the initial double bill of the night was Martha Jamieson’s Spinster, a playful if emotionally bittersweet (almost) one-woman show, essentially about connection and the 'cost' of being single in the modern day.

Jamieson wrote the piece while on the Young Everyman Playhouse Writers’ course and presented an early version at a YEP showcase in 2025, developing it further to create the iteration staged as part of Up Next.

She writes with a lively and engaging voice, one brought to life here by actor Isobel Balchin, playing the eponymous young singleton with similarly engaging brio.

What Spinster certainly has no intention of being IS a spinster (although perhaps someone older and wiser should take her aside and spell out the benefits!)

Instead, what she evidently craves is love, financial security…and a sort of validation through being desired and wanted by another human being, something she’s willing to throw herself into wholeheartedly, if not always successfully.

Jamieson’s needy creation invites the audience into her world as she prepares for a ‘meeting’ with a man, with a series of entertaining interactive moments along the way including one involving a male member of the audience gamely taking the role of a ‘scripted’ practice date, another being instructed to tidy her room, and two women co-opted as a makeshift ‘glam squad’ posse of female friends.

The spectre of that patron saint of fictional singletons, Bridget Jones, hovers just out of sight, although a bravura rendition of All By Myself (performed in PJs and dressing gown) is surely a homage to Helen Fielding’s 1990s creation.

Things have certainly changed since Bridget's day, with her awkward romantic encounters taking place ‘IRL’ as opposed to a modern dating scene carried out through apps and driven by algorithms.

This remoteness means we root all the more for Jamieson’s yearning heroine who is at least brave enough to put herself out there in person, even if she turns out to be cheerfully deluded at the same time (without wanting to spoil the plot, there’s a neatly delivered and unexpected twist to the tale).

In its present state, Spinster has got bags of potential, although I’m not sure what the writer’s ultimate ambition for it is – its concise story arc makes it difficult to see how it might sustain a running time much longer than the current 20-25 minutes.

Funnily enough, while it’s not clear how it would work as a longer stage play (if that's the plan), it DOES have the feel of a promising pilot for a tragi-comic TV series of half-hour episodes, one in the vein of a Bridget Jones/Miranda but for the Zoomers of the 2020s.