Review by Simon Jenner, May 3rd 2025
“Mags and Ruby are in their tin-can flat, so high up you could kiss the sky. Mags’s mum Queenie has “downsized” into an urn.” Two friends Ruby (Lexi Pickett), Mags (Rach Mullock), are “better than sisters. Conjoined twins”. That’s because Queenie adopted Ruby too, who’s abjured her past. But what do each want? It’s typical of the Lantern Theatre, producing 38 shows this Fringe in both theatres, to produce startling work early and keep the momentum. Here’s one. Brighton-based Corrina O’Beirne’s With Ruby & I at The Lantern Downstairs Studio is directed by Christine Kempell till May 4th, then 22nd-24th May also in the 21.00 slot.
Rach Mullock and Lexi Pickett. Photo Credit: Sam Cartwright
There’s a triangle in this devastating 60-minute take on the classic 1986 film Withnail & I which sexualises the characters whilst swapping the friends’ gender too. It’s delightfully raunchy, full of filthy exuberance: perfect post-watershed viewing (it is after 21.00). But there’s more than a touch of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, and even Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It’s also memorably witty, and you’ll need to savour the lines and take a notebook.
And there’s a question-mark tacitly hidden in this play too. It’s not that the relationship is quite toxic. Mags, played with anxiety and a pitch of naturalism by Mullock, is relatively without guile. But she’s shrewd and Mullock is full of nuance: she enjoys the widest range of emotions. And she’s good at detecting things. She plans a revenge showdown wrapped as a birthday present for her prospective bridesmaid. But then Ruby wants to be the bride.
This is interspersed with wild nights out, disco biscuits, chocolate liqueur and partying where they’re quite likely to find themselves in other clinches.
Deploying rhyming couplets with often baroque adjectives “Byzantine snakes” Alexander now moves between heightened verse and prose delivery. It’s a new departure.
Rach Mullock and Lexi Pickett. Photo Credit: Sam Cartwright
Both women have in varying degrees enjoyed men (Ruby very slightly), but it’s Mag who feels pulled to old flame Tony (Sam Cartwright). Tony’s been sent back from Afghanistan where he flinches at the truth of what he’s done. He even makes crude jokes about women suicide bombers, to out-Ruby Ruby’s dark ones. Cartwright has the measure of a man struggling to articulate, as if he’s navigating another minefield sewn by enemies, his own fumbling actions and misdeeds, and the occasional remoteness of his lover. He’s superb in his hesitations.
Tony’s in love with Mags, but as the blurb says “does she love him as much as he loves his Subaru?” Mags has fallen pregnant, but we see after eleven weeks she realises she can’t keep a baby (we’re not told details) and Ruby decides on a devastating course to kill or make three birds with one stone.
Pickett’s always enjoyed an angular Shakespearean role, and here she’s absolutely the dominant tattoo’d butch to Mags’ softer femme. But these roles aren’t so polarised, and they’re both capable of tearing strips off each other.
There’s repeated exits but can these two really stay away?
Lexi Pickett and Rach Mullock. Photo Credit: Sam Cartwright
Rach Mullock and Lexi Pickett . Photo Credit: Sam Cartwright
Pickett though proves Ruby’s secrets include her name, and despite her rejecting her abusive mother, there’s links with her past that might transform our understanding of her. But nothing explains either Ruby, or explains away the co-dependant love these two women feel for each other. There’s a shocking plot and denouement and a postlude, where someone might wake to the worst truth of all.
Kempell who’s worked extensively with Conor Baum in th One fell Swoop Project has drawn three superb actors from that company, and it’s salutary to have three actors so often seen in Shakespearean rags, so to speak, in this sharp intake of contemporary gay living.
The trad sofa corner set is a detailed living room with window design From my apex corner it was easy to see the action but some of the blocking on the sofa necessarily obscured a little action for some. With sound and lighting by Luke Ofield (operated by Erin Buckeridge) this is though a solidly imagined world, remarkably banishing the normal black-box feel of the studio.
An original, excoriating play, with its themes of bisexuality disturbing ten oral gay binaries, it might be more closely compared to Rafaella Marcus’ Sap, premiered at the Soho Theatre in 2023: but there it was a man proving a wrecker. Naturally Mike Bartlett’s 2009 Cock is another (now classic) parallel. But this work is different, more savage and noirish. Yet there’s love, exuberance and a kind of fatal attraction.
Corrina O’Beirne ‘s a name to seek out in future and in Kempell and her cast and creatives, she’s found first-rate advocates, worth seeing in London or Edinburgh. A must-see.
Lexi Pickett and Rach Mullock . Photo Credit: Sam Cartwright
