Simon Ward reviews Looking for Giants at the Camden People’s Theatre.

Onto a stage bare except for a stool and a microphone, Abby McCann enters almost sheepishly from a side door but then launches into a remarkable and intriguing preamble to the action. It is about the people whom we have encountered, say at formative moments of our lives, and who thereafter hover at the edges of our consciousness. They affect us disproportionately to the amount of time spent with them, and sometimes in quite unexpected ways. Whether we like it or not, they influence the relationships which we have with people to whom we really become close. These are, perhaps, the giants of the title. And it is probably not that they are in any sense giants themselves, but that the workings of our own imaginations have made them so, for us.

In its final London preview before premiering in a run at the Edinburgh Fringe, Looking for Giants is a new play written and directed by Cesca Echlin. in which Abby McCann takes us through a series of vignettes from a young woman’s life and attempts to illustrate the process she has just described.

The opening situation is a young undergraduate who has not quite devoted enough time to preparing for her dissertation and who cannot resist the allure of partying and forgetting about work during the holidays. She is assigned a supervisor for the work, whose caustic response to her is hilariously and brilliantly rendered. The conceit is that all the other protagonists are voiced using the mic and this device works really well. McCann is a great mimic and captures the intonations and attitudes of all the additional characters perfectly. Echlin’s direction and the use of light, sound and the few props is simple but really effective. As the narrative unfolds it becomes clear that the fantasy world the young woman is building is as important to her as the so-called reality she inhabits. We see this played out again in scenes with a man on an online dating app, and in schooldays with an early almost-sort-of boyfriend.

Somewhat unusually for a play of this type, it is delivered in the third person. The effect of this for me was to create an additional distance between actor and audience, which I am not sure served the piece’s purpose well. The fact that the performer was not also the writer may have contributed to the occasional awareness of the effort of remembering such a long and dense text. Perhaps as a result there were moments where the text was delivered too quickly. In particular, the transition between different scenarios needed to be clearer at times. The writing is rich and full of symbolism and imagery, and the distancing effect sometimes made it more difficult to engage and sometimes to follow. It felt like a play on the very brink of finding an answer, and then never quite getting there. Nevertheless, there are many positives along the way. Abby McCann is charming and effortlessly engaging as a performer. The comic moments are genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. And it will certainly leave audiences with much to think about, rather than providing any easy answers of its own. Perfect for the Edinburgh Fringe.

Looking for Giants will run at the Underbelly as part of the Edinburgh Fringe from 3rd to 13th August.