AMBER

By Diana Simmonds

March 31 2025

AMBER, Essential Workers at the Old Fitz, 30 March-11 April 2026. Photography by Phil Erbacher

Patience is more a necessity than a virtue for a tyro playwright. Amber, by actor and first-time playwright Nikita Waldron, was first noticed in 2021 when it won the ATYP Rebel Wilson Comedy Commission. Four years on and a play about the joys of rom-coms has its own happy ending – at the Old Fitz.

Amber (Waldron) is a ditzy if smart young woman whose dream is to live as if in the Happy Ever After world of Richard Curtis and Nora Ephron. She begins by taking us into her adolescence when, as a 15-year-old she shares all with bestie Gabby (Esha Jessy). In this scenario Gabby is the Carrie Fisher/Rita Wilson/Parker Posey character – earthbound sidekick and ever supportive of her exasperating friend’s fantasies.

Cannily, the hero is represented across the spectrum of male best bud, unrequited love, hopeless love, and high school heartthrob – initially all in one but also distinct as Luca 1, 2 and 3, Harry, Felix, and Hamish (Harry Stacey, Ashan Kumar and Kurt Ramjan). Significantly, Amber’s real world is a cocoon of teenage pink: walls, puffy cushion, and fluffy feather-topped pen for writing in her pink notebook. As well as a rom-com life, she dreams of being a successful writer. And anyone wrinkling their uppity nose at the very idea of romantic comedy, just remember that Shakespeare and Kenneth Branagh did it very well (Much Ado About Nothing.) And so did Emma Thompson (Bridgets Jones’ Baby).

The best rom-coms, however, are laced with a fair amount of pain, even tragedy – Heartburn, Sleepless in Seattle, Something’s Gotta Give, or right back to The Apartment – and Waldron has her writing finger on the pulse of human sorrow. Not least because, sadly, she’s doing that classic thing of writing what she knows.

Starring in your own work is a dodgy proposition, although not as fraught with ego danger as also directing it, and – praise be – Amber is blessed with a fine director in Mehhma Malhi. She orchestrates a fluid and comically credible movement of characters and emotions through the action and applies the brakes to make more of less and vice versa. Although the play could do with a ten-to-twelve-minute kill of its creator’s more darling darlings, it’s nevertheless a work that shows the advantages of listening to critics, growing up, and paying attention. Nevertheless, the way God and atheism form a story strand of their own is, um, unusual.

On opening night the audience was attentive but relatively quiet. It meant that some of the Ephronistic one-liners didn’t fly as they might. Rom-com is a much-maligned genre, unfortunately, which is irritating as, when well written and performed, it demonstrates, I firmly believe, how much more difficult and satisfying it is than plain old tragedy.

Amber is a non-stop talkaholic and Waldron is almost too good at it, but also effective when she slows and lets the feels be seen. The three guys are all convincing in their varying roles and the way their presence is choreographed in a neat use of the Old Fitz’s stage is excellent. The show stealer is Esha Jessy, however, and it’s a dead cert she’ll be on TV before long as a Steph Tisdall or Mary Coustas.

The creative team of set and costumes (Hailley Hunt), lighting (Izzy Morrissey), and sound design and composer (Madeleine Picard) make the very best of their budget and the stage constraints – and, of course, too much pink can never be enough.

Nora Ephron once said, “My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have the potential to be comic stories the next.” Ergo, Amber is an entertaining reminder of the importance of independent theatre for the way it spawns and nurtures new talent. Recommended.