NOT Stalking David Tennant

Living with Johnny Depp

If you cannot manage your 15 minutes of fame all by yourself, then obsessing about someone who can may be the next best thing. In the case of the solo show by Emma Hutchins, NOT Stalking David Tennant, it is Louise who is fixated on the actor currently trying to make up his mind at Stratford. But she and the other three characters Hutchins creates are all suffering from the same sense that something is missing from their lives and that only outside intervention can fill the gap.

At least Louise can console herself that she has her Hamlet tickets on the mantelpiece as well as her box sets of Doctor Who. Indeed, one of the things that irritates her is that she was a fan of the “safe, sweet boy from Paisley” long before he became the Doctor.

Sadly the scale of the dramas faced by Louise and the others (one of them in an ill-advised, silent, Butoh-inspired sequence), are all too predictable – unsatisfactory men, wanting children – and there is nothing in either the writing or the performance to rescue it. By contrast, Living with Johnny Depp, written and performed by Joanne Mitchell, while it touches on similar territory, is sharp, at times brilliantly performed and manages to ask some teasing questions about obsession, desire, disillusion and longing.

Mitchell’s central character is Shania Sweeney, a 15-year-old schoolgirl from County Sligo, a kind of Irish Vicky Pollard without the criminal undertow. Her obsession with Johnny Depp is so complete that it has rubbed off on her teacher and her school’s head teacher in different but equally disturbing ways.

The show is at its raucous and very funny best when Shania is centre-stage; Mitchell catches Shania’s scatter-gun exuberance perfectly, every flick of the hair and grasping of her school skirt. She is not quite as convincing as the older schoolteacher and the vodka-swilling head.

But as more emerges about the lives of these women, we learn that the teacher envies Shania’s youth and is herself far from oblivious to the masculine charms of Mr Depp and that the head teacher, too, is trapped in a job she hates and a life which depends on it and would not be averse to Mr Depp arriving in a coach and four to carry her off.

It is an altogether superior show, which is not to say that Depp is a better actor than Tennant – merely that it is the quality of the obsession that counts, not its object.

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