There is no denying that Maimuna Memon is a serious talent. The Olivier Award-winner — celebrated for her work in Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 and Standing at the Sky's Edge — has a voice of remarkable range and warmth, and a stage presence that commands a room from the moment she enters it. In Manic Street Creature, now receiving a new production at the Kiln Theatre directed by Kirsty Patrick Ward, that talent is very much on display. The problem is that it is not well served by the material surrounding it.
The show follows Ria, a Lancashire singer-songwriter who moves to London to make her name, falls in love with the troubled Daniel, and finds herself drawn into the exhausting orbit of his mental illness. It is a story rooted in Memon's own experience, and one can only respect the courage and honesty that self-exposure requires. But good intentions do not automatically make for good drama. The narrative leans heavily on familiar tropes — the wide-eyed northerner adrift in the big city, the brooding damaged love interest, the slow sacrifice of self in service of someone else's pain — and rarely finds a way to make these feel fresh or surprising. We have walked this particular road before, and the signposts here offer few surprises.
Boy struggles with depression, medication makes things worse, the relationship pays the price. There is an authenticity to the messiness and the lack of neat resolution, but a theatre piece needs more than authenticity to hold an audience for ninety minutes without an interval. The story, sustained without a break, eventually begins to feel more draining than illuminating.
As for the songs themselves — the engine on which this gig-theatre format depends entirely — they are pleasant enough without ever being memorable. Memon's folky, jazz-inflected compositions are performed with total commitment, but as the evening wears on, the songs begin to blur into each other, their similarities more apparent than their distinctions. When the music fails to fully captivate, there is little else to compensate.
The band members — Heidi (Rachel Barnes), Finn (Sam Beveridge) and Raz (Harley Johnstone) — move well between drums, guitar, cello and keyboards, and there is an easy, natural synergy between the performers on stage. Yet their characters remain largely underdeveloped — named, but little more — and the storytelling occasionally skips over emotional ground that deserves more careful handling, leaving certain plot developments feeling imposed rather than genuinely felt.
Memon carries the entire dramatic burden herself, which speaks to her stamina as a performer but also highlights the show's structural thinness. What might have felt raw and confessional in a Fringe room struggles to generate the same intimacy at the Kiln, where the scale of the space works against the piece's more personal ambitions.
Memon herself remains compelling throughout — a performer of undoubted gifts, and a figure from whom we will rightly hear a great deal more. But a showcase, however impressive, is not the same as a fully satisfying piece of theatre. Manic Street Creature left me admiring the artist while wishing the work had given more to hold onto.
It runs until 28 March.