Life throws up real challenges for the 17-year-old daughter of a split home in the UK who aspires to run her own florist business. The one person play by Emma Dennis Edwards, inspired by the true story of Tottenham community leader Gina Moffatt, is unflinching. It doesn’t hold back. In patterned jeans and striking green top, Lucy Ansell takes on the role of the central figure, Angelique. But more than that, she also adopts the persona and voices of the characters who inhabit her world, fractured that it is.
Angelique is studying floristry at college, where she is one of teacher Carol’s best and most enthusiast students. Domestically, Angelique doesn’t get along with her father’s partner, and with her mother in prison – again – she is with first time foster carer Sam. Sam is gay, a decent sort, whose one rule is that the pair is honest with each other.
That is fine most of the time, except when Angelique sneaks out to be with her good for nothing boyfriend, Mickey. She loves Mickey, even though he is not a stranger to verbally deriding her. Mickey has gotten in with a bad crowd and is in debt to a standover guy named Rampage. And then something happens to Angelique that she can’t just brush aside.
Funeral Flowers was first performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2018, where it won a Scotsman Fringe First Award. Now it makes its Australian debut. It is a story of social inequality and struggle, of fighting through in spite of everything thrown at you.
A cracking script is matched by an equally powerful performance from Lucy Ansell, who, time and again, switches gears so convincingly. She brings naturalism … authenticity to her depiction of Angelique et al. I speak not only about her superb delivery, which includes her vocalisation and expressions, but her sense of timing – knowing when to pause and reflect. It is a showing with great emotional resonance.
The narrative is peppered with a few bouts of hip hop poetry, while the diverse array of music and sound all but serve as additional characters. So, too, the mood affecting lighting on a creative set where three tiers of reeds and flowers are front and centre, along with scattered childhood memories. Plaudits on all these fronts to set and costume designer Bianca Pardo, lighting designer Kyra Ryan and sound designer Christian Biko.
Director Candy Bowers has done an outstanding job letting the piece breathe, with short blackout sequences adding to the human drama inherent in the prose. But above all, Funeral Flowers is a triumph for Lucy Ansell, who inhabits Angelique like a second skin. Sixty minutes without interval, it is on at Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre until 23rd August, 2026.
Alex First
Other reviews you might enjoy:
- Super (Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre) – theatre review
- Your Name Means Dream (Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre) – theatre review
- Moth (Theatre Works) – theatre review
Alex First is the editor of The Blurb. Alex is a Melbourne based journalist and communications specialist. He also contributes to The Blurb on film and theatre.