TakeOver Festival has come to a close with a succession of intimate one or two-handers in its studio space. The final show of the festival was Dry Ice, which premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last summer and was directed by Friends star David Schwimmer.
Sabrina Mahfouz, writer and performer, worked in a strip club to put herself through university (slightly less scandalous than one might think - as a waitress), but the experiences she came away with were enough to fill a notebook. And, as it happens, a 50-minute long, one-woman show.
Those 50 minutes flash by as Mahfouz, playing a stripper called Nina, adeptly and intelligently takes the audience through a range of characters, introducing us (among others) to the different types of clientele one might expect to find at a strip club and a comedic set of middle-class dinner party guests. Mahfouz has a protean talent, snapping from one character to another with an impressive vocal range and a particularly elastic set of facial expressions.
However, at times she seemed somewhat lacklustre, and the show over-rehearsed - presumably one of the expected pitfalls in reviving a show that was done every day for a month at the Fringe. Mahfouz also could have afforded to take a little more time, as her fast-paced delivery meant the audience didn’t have time to process some of the very funny, very clever wordplay that underpinned the writing. Perhaps some Fringe habits are a little hard to break.
Review by Frances Hughes
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