A fat lot of good

Jenny Eclair: The Andy Warhol Syndrome Pod Deco

CAROL Fletcher is 43 years old and in disgrace. She wakes up in a single bed at her mum's, and straight away we are aware of a life that has gone terribly wrong. During an agreeable hour we find out how.

Jenny Eclair's one-woman play, co-written with Julie Balloo and Tom Husinger, examines the fallout of the 15 minutes of fame that Andy Warhol said would come to everybody in our media-driven age.

Carol, a bubbly. loudmouthed northerner, was discovered by TV producers when she lost several stone on a sponsored diet. She soon gave up her market job - "People were after me autograph, not me fresh produce" - and started doing the Z-list celebrity circuit, opening supermarkets and appearing on daytime TV.

But she learns that fame is fleeting and ends up "wiping arses in an old people's home" after an indiscretion involving a waiter at a drunken awards dinner at the Dorchester Hotel. He sells his story to the tabloids and her husband and children throw her out.

Eclair's play is full of the cracking one-liners we would expect from the 1995 Perrier comedy award winner - "My husband loved me being fat. I think it's because it was like being in a threesome in bed" - and the play zings along.

There are several sly lines about celebrities - Eamonn Holmes, "the Brad Pitt of daytime TV".

Eclair does the pathos, too, and we believe Carol's descent into notoriety.

The cramped set - bed, dressing table and chair, clothes strewn about - adds to a sense of a small life that has just become smaller.

Chris George directs.

. Until 29 August.

Information: 08707 557705.

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