Fringe 2025 – Service Please ⭐⭐⭐

Edinburgh Reporter

12 hours ago

What happens to us when everything we thought we knew turns out to be fiction? Should we keep trying to recreate our fantasy world, or face up to reality and maybe even try to change it?
Barcelona Bites is a tapas restaurant, and Lara's been working there for five months. The service industry isn't where she'd thought she'd be after her Creative Writing course; it's probably not the dream destination for many arts graduates but it's where most of them end up. Times have changed since the 1960s, when a degree in English was a hot ticket to the BBC and Fine Art students could spend the rest of their days painting nudes in a Parisian garret. But Lara doesn't mind; she knows she'll get her novel finished someday, and in the meantime serving up plates of patatas bravas does pay the rent.
In Constance Peel's one woman show Service Please we first meet Lara as a relatively new – and relatively keen – member of the tapas team. It's no fun being the newbie, there's no practical training and she gets everything wrong, but the Head Chef is kind to her, he's her 'weird chef Dad.' What's more, this baptism of fire soon inspires her to start writing a fantasy romance starring Amara, a pupil at Dragon Academy. It's all good.
As Lara runs from kitchen to table and back again, Constance conveys the ever more frantic atmosphere in a restaurant beset by the challenges of too many Christmas parties, entitled customers, stupid jokes and endless complaints. Lara even begins to enjoy herself; customers, good and bad, inspire her writing, and Amara is flourishing too. The Head Chef showers her with gratitude and prosecco.
Lara thinks she has everything under control, but Constance drip feeds us little nuggets that show us how innocent her heroine really is. Lara doesn't question the chef's motives any more than Amara questions her Headmaster's; both of them look to men for validation. Lara lives in a fictional fantasy world, where happy endings are there for the taking – if men are good enough to hand them over.
When Lara's promoted to the management team she's pleased – until she finds out just what that entails; more rushing from pillar to post, more fielding of complaints, overrunning shifts, now all served with the added seasoning of staff problems, and for a generous pay rise of 19p per hour. Her writing is suffering, she's too exhausted to think about it; instead she goes to bed with a head full of misplaced orders and mismanaged tables.
And then something happens, something that shocks Lara to the core and sends her confidence into freefall. Lara tries to get it out of her system and into her novel, but that doesn't help; Amara's as lost as her creator. Abuse of power and gaslighting are both explored as Lara blames herself to excuse behaviour that has no excuse, but still so often finds one.
Lara's eventual escape from her torment comes through the much greater suffering of another woman. It's to Constance's credit that she makes sure her character realises that most people in service jobs are far more 'stuck' than she is; for them the work isn't a stopgap, and no matter what it throws at them they have little choice but to suck it up.
The resolution of Lara's story did, however, seem to me a little too easy, calling to mind the ending of so many chick lit novels in which the heroine inevitably ends up with a lovely little life. The difference here is that Lara's love life hardly features at all; she makes frequent references to her boyfriend Ash, but we know nothing about him, and I began to wonder why he featured at all. Some development of his character, if only as he affects Lara's life, would have added interest, alternatively he could have been axed to sharpen the focus on Lara herself. When she leaves the restaurant, Lara tells us that Ash is 'proud of her'; should this have mattered?
Service Please does perhaps place a little too much reliance on the one swear word; I have no objection to it, and one only has to watch any fly-on-the-kitchen-restaurant-wall documentary to know how frequently it's screamed across the counters, but a bit of variety in the oaths department would have been welcome.
A show at 9.55 in the morning is not an easy thing to pull off, especially when Edinburgh's weather has taken a turn for the worse. Audiences are neither warmed up by the sun nor other shows, nor are they fuelled by a good lunch or a few beers. Despite this, Constance keeps the audience's attention throughout, and really brings home to us the challenging drudgery of restaurant work, an aspect of modern life rarely addressed in theatre.
There's also a lot of humour in a play that could otherwise have turned into a relentless serving of woe; I particularly enjoyed Lara's description of middle-class parents encouraging their offspring to take their time to recite the entire table's orders while the infuriated waiting staff stand smiling through gritted teeth. I bet this scene has been played out in every eatery across the city this month. Parents who assume everyone will find their children every bit as enchanting as they do really do deserve spittle in their soup.
Service Please, written, directed and performed by Constance Peel, is at the Stephenson Theatre at theSpace@ Surgeons' Hall, Nicolson Street (venue 53) at 9.55am every day until 23 August. Tickets here.
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