Press for When to Run
Press reviews, interviews and audience reviews
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"A stunning, electrifying show full of imagination and verve."
Irvine Welsh
"Her use of different voices is astonishing."
Blake Morrison
"Sophie Woolley's cleverly interwoven series of four monologues is packed with delicious observations and clever understanding of how and why people sublimate action with the physical duress of running. It is also a nicely worked story, revealing gently and by degrees the interconnections of three women whose affairs and marriages are going through a rough time."
The Stage
"This one woman show examines the self absorbed world of four different running women. In her tour de force performance, Sophie Woolley effortlessly jumps from the high profile executive, the dog walker looking for love, to the troubled teen. All these characters try to run from their reality but no matter how fast or hard they sprint the truth becomes the stitch that forces them to catch their breath and reconsider their lives."
Three Weeks
"When you run, you're in your own world but the women in Sophie Woolley's show are closer to each other than they think. Woolley plays three women and a girl finding more in running than just speed. There's a depressed yuppie wife, a controlling life coach, a needy dog walker and a teenage athlete a wonderful creation."
The Scotsman
"Like cult British TV show Nighty Night or Chris Morris trend-destroying series Nathan Barley, Woolley writes dark, hilarious monologues that capture a single idea or person in thrilling, hyper-real detail."
Emma Warren, Electronic Beats
Books of the Year 2006
(picked despite not having written a book)
Review by Lynne Walker, The Independent May 2008
Read The Independent review here
Q&A interview in New Statesman 2007
Sara-Mae Tuson UKTheatre Reviews July 2007 *****
This year Sophie Woolley's fabulous When to Run is being performed as part of The London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre. Catch this excellent show at the Purcell room now.
It's disappointingly rare to encounter a show which makes you laugh out loud throughout. This is one of those successful rarities. Woolley's solid comic writing and quick changes between her four characters, is a tour de force in effortless timing.
Four women runners, circling their own ambitions, insecurities and frustrations as they do the park, are unaware of the evident danger posed by a Tony Soprano look-alike. Woolley's writing, projected on a screen behind her (making the show accessible to the deaf and the hard of hearing) underpins her excellent performance. It was one of the many enjoyable features of the show that you could see the dialogue, without its intruding on her performance, although initially it seemed as though it might pre-empt some of Woolley's punch lines.
Here, her wit is multi layered, subtle and deeply incisive. It's impossible not to be moved even as you laugh at the antics of the lazy dog walker, the blonde narcissist, the self help guru (a fabulous creation, whom Woolley ruthlessly exploits, and with her faux posh voice comes the great line; "This isn't my real voice. (But) It's what I sound like inside") and the teenage Kelley Holmes wannabe spurting 'you geh me's' all over the stage. As Shelley, the teenage 'lympic'trainee, Woolley is at her most hilarious, capturing her teenage confidence and street smarts as she rushes headlong towards nonchalant victory. Much has been made of Woolley's friendship with Irvine Welsh, with Welsh saying of When to Run, "A stunning, electrifying show full of imagination and verve," but even without such acclamation, Woolley's talent alone is an assurance of her success.
Her greatest achievement lies in effortlessly moving between the four distinctive characters, and the imagery she creates as well as being funny, is evocative and richthe sense of running is incredibly well drawn, like her characters.
An immensely talented woman, one of the best comedy performances you'll see this year. This is no endurance test, but a fantastic adrenaline rush of a show, with the audience as the most decisive winners.
Extra! Extra! review of Regents Park Open Air Theatre Studio show
Here's one that didn't make the papers
Sophie Woolley's 'When To Run', Royal Festival Hall Purcell Rooms ****
JOE MUGGS
Sometimes you don't realise what's missing til you see it and
certainly it can't have occurred to many people that there was a great
empty hinterland between the broad caricature comedy of Little Britain or The Catherine Tate Show and the sharp, dark literary satire of Martin Amis and Will Self. But Sophie Woolley's 'When To Run' show occupies exactly that gap, and shows up how much unexploited but rich comical and dramatic material there is in the basic character types of Britain and especially London.
The crowd at the South Bank's Purcell Rooms included a lot of 'theatre people', drawn by Woolley's success at this year's Edinburgh Festival, but also contained plenty of young hipsters aware of her history performing in nightclubs and writing for Neil Boorman's uber-cool Shoreditch Twat pamphlet. The stage set that greeted them was simple just a city skyline backdrop and a park bench and that was as fancy as production values got.
Without changing her sportswear Woolley leapt between characters just as convincingly as Tate or the Little Britain boys could with their
changes of grotesque costume. From the gobby would-be athlete teen full of new-cockney "ya get mi?" chat to neurotic go-getting
middle-aged middle-class joggers living in "wow factor 15 loft
apartments" and a wildcard lazy professional dog-walker, she played a group of Londoners we could all recognise, love and loath.
These female characters appeared to get knit together into a too-easy
plot around the male figures which they in turn described but just
as this seemed to be happening, Woolley's writing flew off on anarchic tangents. The gags were frequent, as with the teenager's "respect to any woman who can run 22 miles with porridge poo in her pants" ode to a famous athlete, and the observation of the tabloid phrases ("he's my rock") which people all too easily regurgitate was sharp. Sometimes the jolts between satire and intense theatricality broke the pace of the show, and certainly it wasn't easy, cheesy catchphrase comedy, but 'When To Run' at its best was a neat, subtle observation of the fears and needs of convincing British archetypes.
Review from Lit Up 21 September 2006
"Utterly captivating, Sophie Woolley's middle distance event cuts slices through the city, setting the pace of desperation, of adrenalin-fuelled running, a long lap around an empty centre. This is running away as belonging. On one layer 'When to Run' is a painfully funny and funnily painful relay race run unknowingly by four very different, very connected women. On another is it a race track cut into the corpus of contemporary living. Specifically hilarious, more generally profound.
Woolley's writing is adroit and spacious. She sets her characters in motion a squeaky 15 year old aspiring super-athlete, unphased by the "Local Perverts League", her hulky new date, or Paula Radcliffe's mythic collapses in Athens. A damaged professional obsessively energy-testing her runs and speaking in zipped up, clipped prose, her shadow Botoxed 'life coach' and then Woolley makes her most jumpy character an observer, bench ridden, a restless dog-'sitter', watching much, seeing little.
There is lots here of the body-politics of health, of exercise, of pulling skin over bones, of tightness tuning the nerves higher, of trying to outrun one's devils, of joy through pain, shutting bodies like security gates. All this with warmth and affection for these struggling athletes of the soul. Never cynical about her portraits, for all the failings of her subjects.
Most extraordinary is Woolley's vision of the city at speed. The women seem to notice nothing but themselves when in motion. Only in a car does the place emerge from their shadows of their trajectories as a "blur of twinkles and streaks of lights". The social networks of this hazy city are hilarious combined through a mobile phone, drawing all the racing strands together in murderous farce, around their almost always absent male centre. But this is no apotheosis: life remains community-less, communion-less, layers and lines with the occasional sexual spike. A city locked in the sentence "I love me!". What Sophie Woolley has done is create a warm-hearted comedy in a deeply fragmented but not un-connected world. This is not the Complex that is not complicated, but aspiration to the simple healthy life that is stuck like an electronic bug in a social matrix don't mistake its modesty for lack of ambition: this is an urban epic, a marathon of city and emotions that Woolley makes as easy on the audience as a stroll in the park but a dangerous park."
Phil Smith
Dreams that Money Can Buy interview
Article by Emma Warren in Electronic Beats
What the audience thought at Edinburgh (postings from the Fringe website):
"Saw the poster this morning when I was out running. Had to see it. Glad I did. An energetic performance of a funny and engaging script from a very skilled performer. Loved it. You will too, whether you run or not. Buy a ticket now." Joe Donnachie, United Kingdom
"I just have to agree with those who thought this was good - a good story and an even better performance." Stewart Smith, United Kingdom
"This show had me captivated from start to finish. the actress is highly skilled in her craft and her storytelling technique was impeccable. she made me laugh, she made me cry, and she made me connect with every single one of her characters, despite the gender-barrier. amazing." Alasdair Hunter, United Kingdom
"This is a very 'english' play, where Sophie Woolley plays four characters. With just a chair, a book and a water bottle, she manages to convince the audience that she is whoever she is playing. Her ability to do so comes from great acting, her demeanour and her imitations of different English accents. I usually go to amateur productions and 'fringe' events, and they are usually rubbish. One person shows are the worst. The promixity of the audience to the actor reveals all their weaknesses, incompetence and flaws. We see them sweat. We see them smile nervously when the audience fails to laugh at their jokes. The audience cringes and we wish it would stop- but walking out would embarress the actor even more. Woolley is not one of these. The very clever script, acting that did not falter and 'not losing the plot' made the play enjoyable and easy to watch despite a couple of small mistakes in her delivery. The audience was caught up in her story, and we caught a glimpse of life in the Southeast- from the skinny, perfect lives of blonde english businesswomen, to the scummy rough hovels of the lower class teenager. Amazing." Dawn Wong, Singapore
"The actress performs the various characters with a delicacy which is rarely seen. her affection for each of them is clear, though they are none of them perfect. Her voice has a fascinating quality and her physicality is brave and effective. A really interesting show overall." Richard Borrett, United Kingdom
