You're Not Like Other Girls Chrissy: The Rotunda, Iffley (From The Oxford Times)

You're Not Like Other Girls Chrissy: The Rotunda, Iffley

2:45pm Wednesday 8th February 2012 in Theatre By Rowena Purrett

On January 31, those lucky enough to get tickets to The Rotunda saw the first sell-out performance in a new tour of You’re Not Like the Other Girls Chrissy, a one-woman show by Caroline Horton.

Based upon the life — or, more accurately, love life — of Horton’s own grandmother, the piece details the cross-cultural courtship between Chrissy, an ebullient Parisienne, and Cyril, an English teacher from Staffordshire. The play opens as Chrissy (Horton) comes barrelling on to the stage, laden with suitcases and speaking in breakneck French. She considers the audience, squinting in confusion through her jam-jar glasses, before realising that we are “Eenglish”. With that sorted out, Chrissy informs us that we’re standing in a queue at the Gare du Nord. Imagine our bad luck, she says, to be stuck next to her in a queue for an hour. The hour passes regrettably swiftly though as, with the simple yet ingenious contents of her cases, Chrissy tells her tale.

Spattered with brilliantly bumbled English-isms, Chrissy spends the first half an hour energetically explaining how she met her fiancé at a Staffordshire tennis club and then how she showed him around Paris at Christmas. At this point a suitcase opens to reveal a pop-up Paris — a cardboard city complete with its own tiny lights. But this is a story that spans the Second World War; it can’t all be tennis and Tuileries. And soon enough Horton’s ever-present humour is laced with something more serious.

Closing with footage and photographs of the real-life Chrissy, the performance switches seamlessly between heart-warming and poignant, while remaining at all times entirely charming. Horton performed to critical acclaim at the Edinburgh Festival, winning the Stage Awards Best Solo Performer of 2010, and it’s really not hard to see why.

There is also a performance of the piece at the Mill Arts Centre, Banbury, on February 28 at 7.30pm (01295 279002), www.themillartscentre.co.uk.