Sock it to me.

Lee Mattinson’s short, bitter sweet monologue captures the cruelties of being a teenager all too well.  Donna is fourteen years old, fat, and wears glasses; she is also bullied relentlessly. The play opens with her pulling a sign off her back that says “Donna eats shit” and her unfazed, almost upbeat reaction to finding the insulting note quickly establishes her cheery nature. She is a character to whom the audience soon warms.

It becomes clear that Donna has more problems than any teenager should have to deal with. As well as the bullying,  Donna has lost her dad and been neglected by her mother. But Mattinson’s play balances the bleakness of the material by having  Donna share her happy memories with the audience, ensuring  things never become too maudlin. In fact Donna is so cheerful in the face of such adversity that there are times when it feels overdone and unrealistic.

This is modified considerably by Paula Penman’s enthusiastic and engaging performance as Donna; she single-handedly brings the story to life using only the items she finds in her school desk.  Sock puppets are used to depict conversations between her mam and nana and she uses toy rats to stand in for the bullies. While this is nicely done, there are times when it feels like we are watching someone much younger than fourteen; Donna’s naivety and childishness feel more suited to a girl of eleven than an adolescent. Director Laura Lindow, however, makes it intriguingly unclear how much of what we’re told is drawn from Donna’s imagination.

When Donna is tasked with getting a person to tell their story in order to present it at the annual Christmas pageant, no-one at school wants to be her project partner so she ends up investigating the story of Stewart, the cross-dressing butcher who lives downstairs. Stewart quickly becomes her confidante, someone with whom she can share an otherwise lonely existence; he gives her hope that she’s not alone and let’s her know that there are people out there who want to be her friend. The descriptions of her interactions with Stewart show a more mature and emotionally complex side to her character, something that might have been developed further.

Mattinson’s play occasionally seems  to exist oddly out of time. At the start, a late 1980s/early 1990s setting is implied, what with the references to getting drunk on mam’s Taboo and lemonade (as well as adding ice cream to make a ‘float’) along with memories of Donna’s dad working at the Arctic Roll factory. It felt jarring then to have them juxtaposed with later references to Cheryl Cole and Peter Andre. These inconsistencies aside, the writing is well observed and enjoyable and the play’s ending, when it comes, is completely unexpected – it would spoil it to say anymore, suffice to say that as with the rest of Donna’s story, it’s sad, tinged with comedy and ultimately optimistic.