With a Little Bit of Luck can best be described as a mash up of garage rave and show. It has all the energy of a club night but the storytelling chops of a strong piece of theatre (written by rising star Sabrina Mahfouz). The one-woman show features Seroca Davis, who multi-roles a world of characters ably abetted with music DJed live by Gabriel Benn and sung by Martyna Baker.
In the cabaret seating close to the stage we are first invited to sing, dance, get out of our seats, or simply to do the ‘shoulder shuffle’, as the musicians warm us up with a jam. As the first song starts (Flowers by Sweet Female Attitude) nostalgia well and truly kicks in: a group of audience members get off their raked seating and begin to dance. Looking around, nearly everyone has turned to a friend, moving with energy and singing lyric for lyric into one another’s smiling faces. We are only about four minutes into the show and the atmosphere has us all lit up.
Four songs in and we are joined by Davis as the story unfolds. We are taken back to the summer of 2001 when a young woman, Nadia, has just been offered a place at university to study business management. Her wannabe MC boyfriend, T, has big plans for the two of them, selling fake designer handbags, and can’t understand why Nadia would give up this chance to make it big together. But Nadia, at 19 years old, is full of her own dreams and aspirations, and we follow her story, through the good, and at points very bad choices that she makes. So charismatic is Seroca Davies’s portrayal – and so likeable is Nadia’s character – that we are rooting for her all the way. Of course Sercoa plays all the parts, not only Nadia, and her switches to other physicalities and mannerisms are fluid and believable – she is a pleasure to watch.
And Martyna and Gabriel keep the classic garage tunes coming, expertly underscoring Nadia’s story before coming to the forefront of the piece where the audience eat them up. Nadia loves music and so smartly matched music to amplify each moment of her life – whether euphoric, in love, scared, hopeful – feels an organic formal choice as well as a treat for a nostalgic audience whose reaction to each classic track is audibly joyful.
As the story develops, the script plays on this nostalgia, casually touching on a long line of memories from the early noughties that make us smile: Nadia’s disbelief that Beyonce and Jay-Z are rumoured to be dating, her excitement at watching the brand-new channel called E4. These are accessible memories that we share – along with the arrival of a new coffee shop called Starbucks – and they resonate, chiming with our place in this recent history. Alongside the perfectly put together soundtrack, our memory and senses are fully immersed: we come to a deeper understanding of the characters as we hear their favourite music played alongside hearing their stories. The themes of this piece – friendship, love, dreams, hope and risk-taking – are ones we all know well, impulses that we all have our own soundtracks to. We may even have put these on a mixtape for ones we hoped would get to know us before now. The storytelling is as fast-paced as the beats and we are put much more easily into the place of the characters for it.
After an hour the show is over and we are left desperate for more songs. As it tours, the company have presented With a Little Bit of Luck as part of a line up in a more gig-themed evening, and I was left longing for the opportunity to dance properly to some of the classic tracks that we were teased with throughout. So as a standalone show it works slightly better as a piece of theatre than as a gig, but for anyone who would like to be taken back to 2001 for an hour – this brilliantly styled and thought out music show is the one to see.