The title is a joke, of course. Or maybe a promise. Or possibly both. My First and Last Solo Show announces itself with a wink before it breaks your heart, which turns out to be exactly its method.
Four years in the making, this world premiere by Natalie Rose, co-commissioned by Campbelltown Arts Centre and produced by Performing Lines, is one of the most quietly devastating pieces of autobiographical theatre to emerge from the independent sector in some time. It is also, frequently, very funny. The two things are not in tension here. They are the same thing.
As the audience enters, Rose and her real-life 15-year-old daughter Mabelle Rose are already onstage, visible behind sheer upstage drapes, in what appears to be unhurried conversation. The intimacy is immediate. When they step into separate pools of light, left and right, the dialogue that follows is rapid-fire, generationally charged, and recognisable to anyone who has ever been in a car with a teenager who considers most of what you say to be mildly embarrassing. The banter draws easy laughter. Mabelle's dismissive retorts land with the kind of comic timing that no director can fully teach, it is the timing of someone who has genuinely heard all of these sentences before.
But My First and Last Solo Show is not a comedy about generational difference. It is a show about memory, what we carry, what we lose, and what we build deliberately so that others might keep it. Rose's artistic statement puts it plainly: this show is a memory she is making for Mabelle. The biographical material that follows earns that intention entirely.
Rose speaks of her own childhood with candour that drew audible gasps from the audience on the night reviewed. Her parents' separation. Her stepfather. The violence. A childhood she describes as largely absent from her own memory before the age of twelve. What ensures this is more than a trauma narrative, though, is the frame around it: the self-aware, self-deprecating mother who apologises for the awkwardness she inflicts on her daughter including, she acknowledges with a certain comic grace, this show, while simultaneously ensuring her daughter will have the early memories she herself was denied.
The most remarkable theatrical sequence involves Natalie Rose's own mother, now living with dementia. We hear actual recorded dialogue first, being Rose speaking gently with her mother, the responses drifting and incomplete. And then Mabelle, fifteen years old, steps into the role of her grandmother. What follows is an acting achievement of genuine distinction. The physicality, the vocal shifts, the particular quality of a mind reaching for something just out of grasp. Mabelle Rose plays it with authentic precision that silences the room.
These scenes recur. Each time the recorded voices arrives, it grounds the scene in documented reality before the theatrical transformation takes hold. The effect accumulates, and it is considerable.
The production's most powerful staging choice comes near the close. As Natalie Rose delivers her confrontation with her mother (demanding answers about the protection that was never given) Mabelle quietly pulls down the sheer drapes that have framed the space throughout the evening. It is a simple act. It opens everything up. And it arrives at precisely the moment when the confrontation reveals its own futility: dementia doesn't yield answers. The conversation trails off to nowhere. The drapes fall anyway.
Directed by Clare Britton, with sound design by James Peter Brown that weaves the recorded material into the live performance with great sensitivity, My First and Last Solo Show is the kind of work that justifies a four-year development. It earns every moment.
Funny, raw, and quietly devastating. If it returns, don't miss it.
My First and Last Solo Show staged at Campbelltown Arts Centre, 17–19 September 2026.
(images: Lucy Parakhina)
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