BWW Reviews: HAND-ME-DOWN, Tristan Bates Theatre, June 16 2011

Charities and volunteering are in the news more than ever, be it chuggers on the high street, appeals for Japan after the tsunami (that's Japan - the country with the third largest GDP in the world) or David Cameron's hard to explain and even harder to sell "Big Society". All these themes (and more) swirl about amidst the runner rails stocked with others' cast-offs, in Kate Craddock's one woman tour-de-force, "Hand-me-Down" (at the Tristan Bates Theatre until 2 July).

In a area not much larger than half a dozen Top Shop changing rooms, Ms Craddock rattles through the rails donning a dizzying range of garments to create half a dozen or more characters whom anyone who has spent five minutes in a charity shop will recognise instantly. There's plenty of laugh out loud moments (a two minute mime in a wedding dress is as funny as anything Mr Bean has done), interspersed between poignant vignettes from the life of a child neglected by her do-gooding mother, who goes on to find maternal love in the letters and old clothes of a socialite who abandoned her own child to work as a missionary. Of course, in Covent Garden, there were always going to be big laughs for the vicious satire on the post-Geldof generation of media stars on the make, who use charity as their ladder to the top. 

Kevin Tweedy's lighting works wonderfully with Steve Gilroy's direction to complement the fine script and the Victoria Wood-like creations, showing just how much comedy and tragedy can be wrung out of so unprepossessing a space. In a one-person show, the one person is the key to its success and Ms Craddock multiple personalities, with plenty of light and shade (literally and metaphorically), entertain us for 70 minutes that go by in a flash. And they also make us think about what we do for charities, and why.