Let's get it out of the way first: Sophie Melville is remarkable in this play. It's a one-act, one-woman monologue which has a blistering story to tell, with twists and turns, shocks and surprises, joy and tragedy, just like your average episode of EastEnders.
But Melville doesn't just perform the monologue; she doesn't merely act out the role of Effie. Melville is Effie, she becomes her. With so much theatre, and particularly monologues, you can sense the performers acting. It's a largely unavoidable characteristic of theatre, the shared conceit between performer and audience that this is all artifice, it's pretend, make-believe. "We've paid good money to come and watch you mess about on stage for two hours."
But not when you watch Iphigenia in Splott. Because the performance is so magnetic, and the writing so truthful, that you're sucked into the fiction yourself, helped enormously by Effie's direct address to the audience at the start of the piece. It includes you, accuses you, and involves you. I was there with Effie in the Great Western pub, I was there with her in the bedroom with Lee, and I was certainly there with her in the ambulance. Boy, was I there!
