An A to Z Guide to Dating is built around writer and performer Grace O’Keefe’s mother, who wrote a dating guide in her youth that publishers at the time claimed would set feminism back 20 years. As the audience arrive, O’Keefe’s mother is sat among them eagerly awaiting her daughter’s show, but when Grace calls to say she is running late, her mother takes centre stage and begins to promote her book.
Grace’s mum takes us through her A to Z in a slightly unhinged fashion and it is easy to see why the book might have caused concern, with C standing for compliments and the audience being told that giving men compliments is the key to securing a date. The premise has plenty of potential, but the format begins to feel repetitive very quickly. Each letter is introduced before being followed by a musical number, and by the time we reach D the pattern is already becoming predictable. Grace’s mum eventually realises how late it is and races through much of the remaining alphabet in a frenetic combination of song and tap dancing, with the advice becoming increasingly absurd.
The difficulty is that the musical numbers don’t seem to have a clear purpose within the wider piece. They appear intended to heighten the comedy, but many lack the wit or originality to generate the laughs they need, while they don’t substantially advance either the story or the relationship at the heart of the show. The performance style also doesn’t always push the material far enough. With a deliberately heightened and quirky premise, the comedy needs a particularly strong sense of character and comic timing to land, but the delivery occasionally feels tentative rather than fully committed to the absurdity.
There is, however, a glimpse of something much more interesting towards the end. Around ten minutes before the conclusion, Grace finally reveals herself and the show turns towards the relationship between mother and daughter, with the letter Y standing for ‘Yourself’. This is one of the first moments where the piece feels genuinely personal, and it suddenly becomes clearer that there is more at stake than simply an increasingly ridiculous dating guide. The difficulty is that this dynamic arrives so late that there is little opportunity to explore it or allow the audience to understand the relationship between the two women.
O’Keefe does succeed in establishing her mother as an increasingly eccentric presence, and there is something entertaining about watching the character become more and more absorbed in her own advice. However, the character remains relatively one-note for much of the show, which makes the eventual revelation about Grace and her mother feel more significant than much of what has come before.
An A to Z Guide to Dating has an intriguing premise and there are flashes of a much more interesting show within it, particularly when it moves beyond the dating advice and towards the relationship between Grace and her mother. Unfortunately, the repetitive structure and musical interludes mean that these moments are slow to emerge, leaving the strongest material with too little time to develop. There is a potentially much richer story underneath the comedy here, but the show doesn’t quite give itself enough time to find it.
An A to Z Guide to Dating is on at Underbelly George Square 17:15 – 18:15. You can find out more on Grace O’Keefe’s website.
If you like this review you might also like my review of Under the Influence, Bliss and Meet Mayor Max.