Review by Simon Jenner, June 10th 2025
“When you are a child… when you get the feeling that you can’t explain/this feeling that’s inside you but you can’t explain…” Entering the litanic world of Claire Dowie is like hearing a Victoria Wood joke drawn over a hot piano wire. Without the piano. But it’s one full of anaphora (think the Beatitudes), of layered poetic use of the everyday. And some of the punchlines are left in. Otherwise there’s sucker-punches. Claire Dowie’s Swansong, a quartet of solo plays, comes to Finborough directed and designed by Dowie’s collaborator of over 40 years, Colin Watkeys, till July 5th.
Claire Dowie. Photo Credit: Colin Watkeys
Coming to Finborough is only true of two of these stand-up plays. The other two started here, as did Dowie, returning at Artistic Director Neil McPherson’s invitation. Swansong is provocative: Dowie’s not and never could be venerable. Nevertheless it’s nearly 40 years since Dowie – once stand-up and part of a poetry circuit that included John Hegley and her brother John Dowie – began here.
After cheery introductory remarks, Dowie opens with her 1987 Adult Child/Dead Child, first seen late night at the Finborough but now more humanely. Lasting like all the plays 70 minutes, it’s possible to see all four without one kind of overload. It explores what it’s like to grow up unloved; disapproved of in a “clean” house where clumsiness and dirty feet don’t fit, where a squeaky-clean sister leaves a shining wake you can’t possibly follow. Dowie memorably wishes her character’s child self could be Spiderman, so only walk on the ceiling; but then that’s clean too.
The effect though is a dividing self. An imaginary friend, later called Benji emerges. Benji finds Claire’s altered ego staid, and demands she do something about insults and much else. When a friendly lady moves it’s Benji who demands the un-invisible narrator acts to avenge insults neighbours threw at her. It’s when she realises Benji’s a “monster, and a horror and a terror.” But she can’t resist her. She must keep her secret or she’ll end up in the Snake-Pit; or in other words the bin.
Dowie’s character recounts the confrontation of two personalities: a law-breaking self faces down the conforming ‘other’; or any other term it’s easy to use. It’s lacerating, and laceratingly funny. But when Dowie recounts how she flung a hammer at her woodwork teacher Mr Kent, then hit her father with a hammer as he slept, things shift. An emphasis on psychiatrists, of not being found out, and an adult aftermath finds the adult child born of a dead one. Somehow the unloved child needs to find wholeness in the comfort of strangers.
Dowie’s particularly adept at the self-correction, the trip-up line, the confiding and the sudden speeding-up to indicate panic or mainly anger: the fury named Benji in Dowie’s character pursues her. How can she bring a peace to herself, and would she want silence? Dowie makes use of the black blank of the stage, with only that lectern and a jug of water to offset her grey attire.
Lines like “the cupboard. The cupboard under the stairs” are repeated as Dowie sashays through versicles of chant-like moments interspersed with blocks of prose. In 1987 this was groundbreaking and is now ubiquitous What isn’t common though is the poetic structure of these repeated lines, delivered at pace and sometimes breakneck speed. Dowie starts by reading from the lectern, and occasionally reverts to it in timed pauses; yet she has every nuance by heart.
It’ll be fascinating to visit each decade these plays address. Dowie was initially called a female Quentin Crisp. That might have been helpful once, but it won’t do now. Dowie’s pioneered stand-up theatre, but in-yer-face 1990s plays too. She’s never mellowed, and remains essential: taut, inordinate, alone, unreconciled. In other words, see it.
Claire Dowie. Photo Credit: Colin Watkeys
Claire Dowie. Photo Credit: Colin Watkeys
Stage Manager Ted Walliker, Production Photography Colin Watkeys
General Manager Tara Marricdale, Assistant General Managers, Esther Knowles, Jenny Crakes, Assistant Resident Director Jillian Feuerstein,
Producer Neil McPherson for the Finborough Theatre