This bouncy but muddled musical two-hander about the first woman to (allegedly) cycle around the world in 1895 unfolds like a vaudeville act. Annie Londonderry (Liv Andrusier) co-opts shy office girl Martha (Katy Ellis) to re-enact her two-wheeled international exploits with song, comedy, conjuring and melodrama to convince us, the audience, that she deserves a career in newspapers.
Andrusier has charisma and a big, strident voice beyond her diminutive frame. Ellis is conversely fluting and charming. Alas, director Sarah Meadows lets them get away with a grotesque amount of ungoverned mugging and histrionics. Through pleasantly forgettable songs and trite dialogue, writer-composers Freya Catrin Smith and Jack Williams seek to reclaim Annie as a feminist heroine. This premise feels as flimsy as Annie’s own unreliable backstory.
The supposedly single, liberated Londonderry was actually impoverished, Latvian-Jewish mother-of-three Annie Cohen-Kopchovsky, who’d never previously ridden a bike. Her trip was almost certainly a concoction between newspapers for whom she’d previously sold advertising space, and the manufacturer who gave her a bike weighing almost half her body weight. She failed to get beyond Chicago on the first leg of the trip, changed bike and direction, and covered a lot of subsequent miles by train.
Did she really give learned lectures along the way to earn money? Was she really robbed in Egypt and imprisoned in Japan? Much of Annie’s myth stems from books by distant relative Peter Zheutlin, where he fleshed out meagre facts about her with “suspected” romances with a man and a woman. Bit weird. This show’s creators put a comic spin on both affairs while suggesting Annie’s very slipperiness was itself a radical act.
A character so blank she can be anything can also be nothing, though. The idea that Annie embarked on her odyssey after the death of the younger brother she raised feels like tacked-on psychology. Other questions nag like a slow puncture. Did she really wear “one putrid outfit” for 15 months? How did she get food? How did her Anglophone lectures go down in Yemen?
Andrusier gives a stormingly OTT performance: schmoozing the crowd, flashing between vulnerable and abrasive, belting out numbers at the level of a yell. Ellis is her understated foil. The show feels tighter than it did at the Charing Cross Theatre last year and the songs bowl it along for a brisk 90 minutes. Still, there isn’t enough grit in the skimpy story, or conviction in the book and lyrics, to make this anything but lightweight.
Southwark Playhouse Elephant, to August 12, book tickets here
