Review: Rolling With Laughter, Nottingham Playhouse

NATASHA Wood's sassy performance of her life story is as extraordinary as it is hilarious.

Energetic anecdotes from her childhood spent sizing up women for bras on her parent's Bulwell market stall, her years as a student living in a old people's home, not to mention the family holiday where her mother brought back a baby girl from Antigua, are packed into a fast-paced, frank and funny monologue.

But the audience is able to hang on for the ride through Wood's witty characterisations of more than 30 people she met along the way, and by a punchy script, co-written by Beverly Sanders, that never lets time or place become lost among the laughs.

From her talks with the appropriately named Dr Perks about her boob job to her first meeting with her future husband, Wood holds nothing back in the story of how a girl like her came to perform on the West End stage.

Her honesty makes the emotion of her life's most heartbreaking moments, her divorce, the death of her brother, and the handing over of her much-loved disability dog Zoe, all the more powerful.

When the Playhouse wasn't laughing it was holding its breath.

That she does this whizzing around the stage in an electric wheelchair, she was born with Spinal Muscular Atrophy and has so little strength she can't hold a pint of beer, makes her inspiring tale of the power of determination all the more remarkable.

Sarah Firth