If Maxwell’s last show - the delightful I, AmDram - was a tour through a gallery, Nan, Me and Barbara Pravi is a film screening. While the former used a wide lens to capture a theatrical childhood-into-adulthood (Maxwell’s family has been involved in their local amateur dramatics society for generations), this show starts with the same freewheeling cosiness, but then gains propulsion and narrows to a cathartic point. Because this show is lightly fictionalised, I’ll be referring to Hannah Maxwell the performer by her surname, and Hannah Maxwell the character as Hannah.
We first meet Hannah living in Luton, where she’s rushed in, to care for her sweet-natured Nan. Hannah’s grandfather has abruptly and recently passed away from cancer, the anguish of which is intentionally batted away for much of the show by a furious arrangement of quips, skits, and pacy plotting. Maxwell implements a variety of playful audience participation - from attempting to correctly allocate jumbo foam versions of Nan’s many pills to reading out the directions to the Oat So Simple porridge Hannah assembles on stage for Nan’s breakfast.
The staging of the show involves a large projector screen above the stage, onto which plot-enhancing details appear. For this first section, it’s the minutiae of caring: scratchy Google Calendar notes, methodically detailed medication directions. A nosy neighbour pops over multiple times a day. Hannah becomes well acquainted with microwaved cottage pie for tea, and the range of game shows currently on television (at one point, the audience plays along to a round of Countdown). The stultifying mundanity and painful restlessness on depicted strikes a universal cord post-pandemic.
Hannah’s imagination paces like a caged tiger, and it’s not long before she sets her sights on one particular target, the French singer Barbara Pravi, whose sultry Eurovision performance, Parisian glamour, and ‘ambiguous nail length’ ignites an obsessive crush.
Hannah’s inner life floods with heady (and hilarious) imagined flirtation with Pravi. She books concert tickets for several months later, vows to hit the gym, calculates she could be fluent in French by then by studying for three hours a day, seven days a week, and waltzes around the living room with a mop handle. As the day draws closer, she plans their potential Meet Cute with heist-like precision. It’s utterly absurd and utterly fun to watch.
Recently, American rapper and singer Doja Cat faced significant backlash from her fanbase for refusing to say she ‘loved’ them back. In response to her upset fans, she pointed out, entirely accurately ‘I don’t though, because I don’t even know y’all’.
Which is to say: to call Nan, Me and Barbara Pravi a story of unrequited love would perhaps miss the point. It’s about the very real, parasocial love between the fan, and the artist’s persona.
In a parasocial relationship - wherein one person is infatuated, and the other is not aware of their existence - the thrill of the fantasy and the chase is not the beginning of something meaningful, it’s the peak of it. Pravi’s value in Hannah’s life is a mirror of her own unmet want. Through the smokescreen of attraction, she can reconnect to the hopes, dreams and desire that have slowly leached from her life. Most crushes start this way, but a fan crush allows for a protracted stay in this wonderland of possibility. For Pravi to become a real person, with flaws and selfishness, would change the dynamic fundamentally.
Of course for the object of it, this wild, worshipping projection can come off as silly at best, repulsive at worst, something Hannah experiences first hand in her own adoring, twenty-year-old fan, Gemma, haunting her front row each night. Gemma provides a crisp foil to Maxwell’s character, whose blinders block her from recognizing their parallels.
Hannah is already experienced in plucking moments of connection from fleeting encounters.
The life of an actor - particularly a performer of one-woman shows - is defined by fruitful and fallow periods, as well as a singular drive that can easily warp into loneliness: the intensity of rehearsal and production, the elation of performance, followed by the adriftness of regular life between shows.
If there’s one word that could be used to describe Maxwell’s performances, it’s probably verve. There’s a bone-deep showmanship to her performance that never drops away (one nightmarish morning-after-the-night-before is rendered with particular wincing brilliance). A major strength of this production is how polished it is without sacrificing vulnerability. It manages to have moments of bruised self-reflection and pure, unabashed comedic performance, and both feel perfectly in place.
Eventually, the night of the concert arrives, and the show crescendos in a dramatic and compelling climax, which I won’t spoil here. The show is ultimately about the parasocial crush first as a source of connection, motivation, and enrichment, and then as an anaesthetic, a distraction, an oblivion. By the end, the tender line Hannah walks between the two feels hard-won, and profoundly moving. This is a rich and bright character study shot through with both humour and sadness. Consider me a fan.