Ding Dong! Avon Calling at Edinburgh Fringe ★★★
★★★ Ding Dong! Avon Calling | TheSpace at Surgeons’ Hall
Ding Dong! Avon Calling is a witty exploration of female relationships a la Motherhood, that could have been cranked up a few notches to make a pure farce.
A four-hander comic play set inside an Avon beauty products selling racket. The queen bee is Niomi – played by Lottie Adams – who’s the bitchy one, torturing other members of the Avon club with aplomb. The show harks back to the fun, carefree days of the early 2000s, a world of Sugababes, The Saturdays, Mean Girls and Legally Blonde, and is light enough to serve a helping of froth, but doesn’t really delve deep into its characters’ motivations. The Avon lady concept could definitely work even better with a bit more research into the history of women selling Avon products, and why the beauty industry still does this pressure selling to this day.
To create more of a farcical comedy, which really resonates, the characters of Ding Dong! Avon Calling need a little more careful definition, slapstick moments and more explicit body language to offer really play up to their funny moments. The show boasts some strong laughs, mainly delivered by Polly Towers, who does well as a comedy ‘bimbo’ character. The outsiders group of Beni Iviara’s suspicious newcomer Frankie and Sara Faraj’s neurotic, mumsy Sarah-Jane are performed well, but deserved some more awkward comic moments in the script. The whole thing has the feel of a sitcom heading towards the big crescendo of a sales bonanza Avon party that doesn’t quite land with the comedy chaos it required to be a gag-filled riot.
The main bugbear is that the middle-aged yummy mummy characters dreamt up seem too old and stereotypical for the Gen Z company to play – perhaps this is a personal pet hate of an ageing millennial, but why can’t young people just play young people?! The resulting disconnect makes for a bit of misunderstanding in terms of tone and deployment of old fashioned female character tropes (seee Doon Mackichan’s book ‘My Lady Parts‘) like a hag, a stupid tart or a frump – which don’t seem appropriate in the post-Fleabag or Chewing Gum age.
I am Joint Editor at To Do List. I like free, cheap & offbeat London, especially: cabaret, art, theatre, pop-ups, eating out, quirky films, museums, day trips, social enterprise & much more.
