Rosie Kellett in Primadonna at Vaults 2016.

As the veil gets drawn further and further back on the world of stardom and fame, it’s becoming less of a surprise to hear that some of the Hollywood superstars that colonise our tabloids and multiplex screens are less than savoury characters in real life. While that’s not really news to a lot of us, Rosie Kellett’s frantic, compelling and frequently hilarious solo show Primadonna shows the very real consequences of their petty demands. Kellett tells her own true story, drawn from her time spent as the lackey that these people use to realize their petty, childish demands – an overworked, underpaid and under-appreciated personal assistant.

Depicted as a monologue directly from Kellett (as herself) towards the audience, Primadonna is a master-class in how to build pace in a solo show. The piece is anarchic, fast and unrelenting despite the fact that the only other recurring performer in it besides Kellett is a balloon taped to a stick with a face drawn on it in permanent marker. While the lighting, frequent use of unmistakeable pop hits as incidental music and handfuls of glitter contribute the piece’s plutonium-powered pace, all solo shows live and die based on whether their performer can hack it as a storyteller. The truth is that Kellett was born to tell stories, much more so than to find a jobbing actor the right kind of quinoa.

Kellett proves herself to be a firebrand of a storyteller and actress, as able to give a heartfelt, completely believable performance as herself as she is to take on the role of her nightmarish boss or the well-meaning, yet ultimately broken actress (whose name is changed to protect the guilty) that she’s assigned to. Kellett seems to relish these roles, becoming a living, breathing Spitting Image puppet with only a change in posture and accent. A drastic change in posture and accent, admittedly, but when it’s combined with her comic timing, it never becomes annoying or one-dimensional. Kellett’s performance, joined with the razor-sharp script full of quotable lines, makes this worth your time alone.

However, the piece packs in a hell of a lot for a one hour show, and while it’s an entertaining hour to say the least, stretching out the piece a little to make room for some more insight into Kellett’s own character would have made the audience more invested in her plight. There’s a stellar scene between Kellett and her mother that serves to show just how much of her life Kellett’s boss is taking away from her, and a few more scenes like that would have made a lot more impact than a couple of the more wacky scenes, entertaining though they are. An extended run time would also give more time to create a truly satisfying ending, as whilst the ending that’s already there gets an awful lot right, it is very abrupt.

Which is a crying shame because the third act of the piece is very nearly perfect. It’s signposted by a tonal shift in the play from broad comedy to a nightmarish, surreal mood piece showing Kellett’s descend into an anxiety-fuelled breakdown, that uses the anarchic pace and breakneck speed set up in the first two acts to overwhelm the audience before finally giving them some space to breathe in the first genuine blackout they’ve had since entering the theatre. It’s at this point that the real genius of the piece’s writing is shown, as Kellett skilfully weaves the plot in with its themes of acceptance. The things that we all do, and what we’ve done in the past, in order to feel wanted by the people we look up to.

With this emotional centrepiece, Primadonna becomes far more than just another side-swipe at celebrity culture. It reveals itself to be an incisive look into what makes us subjugate ourselves for the sake of another, and how the reason one might do that is a lot more universal than anyone would assume. It’s Kafka meets Keeping Up With The Kardashians, and it comes highly recommended.

Primadonna was on at Vaults Festival 2016. For more of their programme click here.