Review: Clean Slate at the White Theatre

New dark comedy by Bristol creatives explores the role of strategic incompetence in relationships

The simmering sense of anger just boiling under the surface ready to explode, is palpable in Clean Slate. It’s a work in progress performance of this brand-new, one-person show by Bristol-based creatives Louisa Marshall and Amber Charlie Conroy.

With the auditorium arranged in traverse, Louisa Marshall is washing up dishes during the incoming. With a face like thunder and an intense amount of energy focused on some difficult to remove food remnants, this is clearly a woman on the edge.

Reheated rice, we are reminded, can be incredibly dangerous to eat. In a worst case scenario, it can lead to death. A fact just parked in the back of the audience’s memory for later.

Louisa Marshall is an independent woman. She’s in the process of working her way up the career ladder to primary school senior leadership.

Smartly presented with a penchant for Beef Bourguignon, she radiates middle class professionalism and aspiration. But it comes with an increasing layer of desperation that smothers internal screams that occasionally break out through passive aggressiveness.

Can we blame her really? Women are told they can have it all. Often in pastel platitudes found in home wear sections. So why is there still a huge gender inbalance around the roles played at both work and home? And how are these policed? It’s a question Clean Slate asks its audience.

Her relationship with her boyfriend starts in a rather typical way, meeting in a boozy night at Pryzm. What follows is a honeymoon period where everyone is on best behavior. Before the cracks start to show.

The hypocentre of the cracks run from an unfinished piece of IKEA furniture abandoned in the living room for four years. The failure for her boyfriend actually finishing assembling it is an admission of failure that would dent the male pride he’s protecting.

kitchen cupboards are wheeled around like a ball and chain. The pile of IKEA drawers mock throughout. They’ll be done later, and each time she hears those words, the tension behind the eyes, the rigid smile ramps up a little bit more.

She has walked into a domestic trap without even realising. She runs the entire home with zero help from the boyfriend/cock lodger. It’s a socially accepted way of domesticating women. Women are still conditioned into roles of house keeper, carer, carrying the mental load through strategic incompetence. This is is a tactic used by men as well as the enforced and continuing rigid gender stereotypes imposed by society.

One need only spend half an hour on Mumsnet AIBU to see frustratingly, this is a continuing societal issue.

As you feel her final meltdown build, the pressure is suffocating. It does lead to a highly satisfying ending though.

Clean Slate is high on audience participation, the kind that Edinburgh audiences will love. The audience in the main, plays the role of the boyfriend. We are both objective observers and complicit at making prisons for women.

Louisa Marshall’s performance is impressive. She commands the stage from the second it starts and works the audience like a seasoned pro.

Fringe audiences are unpredictable beasts. They range from rabbit in headlights reactions to confident performers. The way she directs and encourages each interaction is well controlled and remains central to the ongoing narrative.

Clean Slate is an entertaining piece of theatre. It finds that sweet balance of humour and escalating drama. It is also a smart observation on the continuing dynamics of the claustrophobic pressures that remain – for women – in relationships in 2025.

Cast and Creatives
Writer and Performer – Louisa Marshall
Writer and Director – Amber Charlie Conroy
Created in collaboration with Dr Kirsty Sedgman

Clean Slate will be at the White Theatre on Thursday 05 June 2025: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/cleanslate/1707468

It will then be at the Riverside Studios in London from 14-20 July 2025: https://riversidestudios.co.uk/see-and-do/clean-slate-177499/

The show will then go to Edinburgh Fringe from 31 July – 24 August 2025: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/clean-slate

Follow Clean Slate on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cleanslatetheplay/

Featured Image: The incoming of Clean Slate at the White Theatre

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