Review: Avon Calling, Camden People's Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Any character that spills their guts without good cause comes across as completely unhinged. Louise Platt’s Avon representative Deborah, a maelstrom in magenta, arrives at your front door laden with both emotional and physical baggage. She volunteers personal information and emotional scars so freely in front of strangers – clients, no less – that she must be the first cosmetics saleswoman without any foundation.

That’s a real shame, because Avon Calling has the potential to be sharply political, as well as a hoot. Instead, it unravels too easily and too melodramatically to hit its target.

The form is a classic case of twist a non-theatrical form of performance into interactive theatre. Platt guides us through the party games designed to sell Avon products, so we’re up on our feet being pampered and playing Put the Lipstick on the Avon Lady and Sniff You Out from the off. Reece Witherspoon, the face of Avon, presides over it, peering glossily out of a vivid pink frame on the mantelpiece.

To make £38, an Avon representative needs to sell £150 worth of product. Given the wholesale discounts she’s forced to offer by the corporation, that’s nine bottles of So So Soft hand-cream per person per party. Debs is nothing but a corporate foot-soldier; a worker bee grafting away to line the coiffeurs of boardroom execs.

Rather than gradually fray in the situation, doing her best to plough one but collapsing, Platt’s character is a nervous wreck whose breakdown is immediately inevitable. In short, it’s her first time hosting solo, seemingly after the death of her mother, whose politely clipped vowels emanate from various moisturisers and mascaras. Of course, over 80 minutes, Debs realises her own exploited status and throws off the shackles for a new career.

But Katie Day's production needn’t go so far. The points about disempowered women, about the beauty industry and paradigms of appearance and, most of all, about corporate injustice read without being so thoroughly exposed and Avon Calling would be far better served by really committing to the Avon party form, rather than overturning it with drama-with-a-capital-d.

It’s still lightly charming and there’s plenty of awkward character comedy to go alongside the party games. Avon Calling works best as an Avon party for those too cynical to be seen dead at such a gathering. Essentially, it’s a parlour game first, and theatre second.

Photograph: Chris Keenan