A remarkable performance, but this one-woman play is thin on laughs Sophie Woolley When to Run

Sophie Woolley's solo show When to Run, written and performed by her, came highly recommended. As a result, I tried so hard to like it, I almost did. It is a shaggy-dog story about four women and a man who looks like Tony Soprano. It is told by the four women, who initially have not met and have little in common besides, as it turns out, the Soprano lookalike. Woolley, who remains in a single outfit - a tracksuit - throughout, differentiates her narrators by accent and idiolect only.

We start off with a dog-walker sitting on a park bench. Julia is lazy, so lazy that her dog walking business, "Dogminatrix", keeps her mainly sedentary. She passes her park time by making silent fun of the runners who pass her bench, although as observational comedy her insights are worth little to the audience, because Julia is not much better than a simpleton. The action starts when the Soprano man becomes entangled with one of her dogs and falls in the lake. Julia, who has up until now decided to sit her life out, invites Mickey, as he is called, back to her place and a romance of sorts starts.

The play eventually shows that she has two rivals for Mickey's heart. The first is Emma, one of those compulsive running types Julia finds laughable. Life for her is one big race and she is out in front. She wears a Stella McCartney Adidas jacket and lives in a "Docklands monochrome show-loft"- whatever that is. She is childless but married, although she suspects her husband may be about to run off with someone else.

Emma's life coach is named Celia. Celia speaks in a Brief Encounter-era voice that Woolley cannot always quite maintain, and is hard to credit. She explains: "I don't really talk like this. It's just the way I sound inside." She also says she is 39, "or something like that". She is, natch, a Botox addict. I didn't quite believe in her and nor, perhaps, does Woolley fully. Although critics habitually praise her for making each voice distinct, I sometimes had to ask myself if I was listening to Celia or Emma.

There was no such difficulty with Shelley, a 15-year-old south London schoolgirl whom I imagined was black. Shelley is not properly woven into the plot, but her story, though slight, is by far the most compelling. Here at last is an authentic voice. Shelley pronounces "little" "likel" and says "ting" for "thing". She invents compound nouns such as "ticket person turnstile fool". Her vocabulary is an education: if you get an unintentional mobile phone call from someone's handbag it is a "ghost message". Her street wisdom is encyclopaedic. She knows a true-life shaggy-dog story is worth £250 to Take a Break.

But apart from Shelley, Woolley's women did not make me laugh and her conceit that women are always running to or from something seemed patronising. I am not sure on what to blame the thinness of the writing, but its hybrid origins as a "spoken word" short story may be one culprit. I more readily blame the low standards that theatre is content to live up to. Woolley had help from an RSC coach with the delivery (excellent - she's unmiked but you hear every word) and for the writing turned to the Soho Theatre. She would have done better to take the piece to a decent TV producer, who would have surely winced at its formality and obviousness. It is an oddly twee text, though exuberantly performed. I hope I'll soon see her star in an edgy sitcom. As a writer, however, she needs to come up with something meatier than an exercise for her virtuosity.

A coda: call me dim, but although I made a note of how women in Woolley's audience outnumbered men, I failed to draw any conclusions about the several deaf people also present. The surtitles that dominated the screen behind her did not strike me as unusual, either. Only later did I discover that Woolley suffers from progressive hearing loss. Let me be clear - whatever her show's deficits, they have nothing to do with her disability, which merely turns her skills as a performer from notable to remarkable.

For more info and tour dates visit http://www.sophiewoolley.com

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times

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