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When you’re the one keeping everything together, how do you stop yourself from falling apart?
Ria is a singer-songwriter. She’s talented. She’s ambitious. And she’s driven- quite literally- all the way from Lancashire to London, to start afresh in Camden Town.
Charting the rise and fall of a rollercoaster relationship, Ria is recording her debut album with her band. But the more the tracks progress, the more music and memory collide…
This soaring piece of gig theatre from Olivier Award winner Maimuna Memon brings a raw and powerful insight into first love, co-dependence and mental health care- but most of all, how music can help us start again.
The critically acclaimed, multi award-winning Manic Street Creature returns to the stage in a new production for a limited run at Kiln Theatre.
When a friend of director Kirsty Patrick Ward went to see a preview of her production of Maimuna Memon's Manic Street Creature back in 2022, it spoke to him so directly that he returned a few days later with his mum in tow. What he could not say to her about his own mental health, the show could say for him.
That kind of response has become commonplace since Memon’s piece premiered at Paines Plough’s Roundabout in 2022, winning her a Stage Award. Memon, a remarkable actor and composer you will almost certainly know from Standing at the Sky’s Edge, the Chris Bush and Richard Hawley musical homage to Sheffield, and the Donmar's musical Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, for which she won an Olivier. Now she’s back with a new iteration of Manic Street Creature at the Kiln Theatre.
Ward, whose directing credits include The Gang of Three at the King’s Head and Groan Ups at the Vaudeville-- made with the Mischief team behind The Play That Goes Wrong-- has been on board the journey with Manic Street Creature since she first saw a workshop of it at the NT studio. “It was a 20-minute extract, and after just two minutes I was thinking to myself, ‘I’m in.’”
The gig theatre show tells the story of Northern lass Ria (played by the Preston-born Memon), who comes to London to make it in the music business and falls for Daniel, a soulmate but a troubled one. But this is far more than a girl meets a complicated guy and thinks she can save him story.
The brilliance of this musical monologue—set in a recording studio with three other musicians, so although it’s a one-woman show, it never feels like one—is enhanced by Memon’s magnetic and delicate performance but also by the way she pushes the narrative forward through the folksy score. The characters are fully fleshed, and the show is urgent and heartbreaking in the way it explores mental health and how somebody else’s trauma can be traumatising. It talks about that with a rare emotional intelligence and depth and does it with soaring lyricism. No wonder Ward was hooked, and audiences have been too.
Ward and Memon have been collaborating on the show together since Edinburgh, first on a version at Southwark Playhouse and now at the Kiln in the piece’s biggest production to date.
26 Feb, 2026 | By Lyn Gardner
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