What it's like to be Ruby

Rating = * (good)

In her new one-woman show, Ruby Wax tells us that the question she is most commonly asked is: "What's Pamela Anderson really like?"

She resented the question, but isn't that all we want to know? What's it like being you, Ruby: being a celebrity, having famous friends, living in Notting Hill, being American, or Jewish, or a woman, or middle-aged. But Ruby didn't really have any answers to such questions.

She kept emphasising how she'd sat on her own thinking, "I'm doing a one-woman show: What am I going to say?" And the truth was: she didn't seem to know. She kept saying: "I'm sharing, now I feel better", and she occasionally said: "You and me [ie, us], we've got a real double-act going."

The truth was: we didn't, and the occasional asides into the worlds of therapy, fashion and parenthood were not enough to conceal the fact that the centre of this show was essentially hollow.

After the somewhat guarded press night, with Lulu out there somewhere, and the lovely Peter Gabriel and Zoe Wanamaker, perhaps things will settle down. Doubtless thousands will flock to this marvellous theatre, all dying to see the real thing on stage. But a number of loyal fans said they'd seen a lot of this stuff on her shows anyway. So maybe we know her too well already: perhaps she really has given us her best.

Ruby's sob story, the secret tragedy behind her lip-gloss world, was that the tooth fairy doesn't really exist. That's the "premise" behind this show, and a pretty thin one it is too. Because Ruby is really best, is brilliant in fact, at being the cheeky girl with her hand over her mouth at the back of the class, a role to which conducting sneakily subversive interviews with celebrities who take themselves too seriously comes naturally. But, with no guests on stage, she seemed unable to decide whether to give us stand-up or theatre, whether to be spontaneous or rehearsed, inclusive or exclusive, confessional or onedimensional.

The final moments of the show, when she finally found an emotional outlet for her fraught relations with her parents, was harrowing. It was a welcome relief, but it was too, too late.

Ruby Wax