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Single White Female

Theatre Royal, Glasgow

Three stars 

 

Relocation, relocation, relocation is the order of the day in this new stage adaptation of Barbet Schroeder’s 1992 schlocky horror psycho-sexual thriller. Drawn from John Lutz’s novel from two years earlier, SWF Seeks Same, the story imagines what happens when a woman’s new flatmate turn out to be mad, bad and very dangerous to know. 

 

Moving house is not only theprime drive for Lisa Faulkner’s Allie as she and her teenage daughter Bella move into a building with seriously shonky electrics after Allie finally ditches Bella’s feckless dad, Sam. Nor is it just about Allie’s new lodger, Hedy, played by Kym Marsh as a Yorkshire sired cuckoo in the nest. 

 

Writer Rebecca Reid has taken the steamy stateside des-res of the film and moved it lock, stock and homicidal kitchen knife to what appears to be a collapsing British suburban tower block. Not only that, Reid has whooshed things forward a few decades from the angsty and uncertain nineties to a twenty-first century where social media enables anyone to slip into someone else’s life at the press of a button.

 

Here, Allie, Bella and Hedy have come home to roost, as Marsh’s initially matey Hedy gradually inveigles her way in to a world she craves. On the surface, her space invading big sister act with Bella and boundary crossing behaviour with Sam is weird enough, but her all-in adoption of a blonde wig and Allie’s cast off designer threads lays bare a damaged woman desperate to fill the void in her own life. 

 

The liberties taken here with Reid’s reboot stays true to its to its source while framing the result as what might appear to those who haven’t seen the film as a brand new story Reid has made her own. Gordon Greenberg’s production trades on Faulkner and Marsh’s star quality to create a winning stew of a story that hints at mental illness at play without ever making it explicit. 

 

With Amy Snudden a believable Bella, Johnny McGarrity a himbo-like Sam, and Andro as Allie’s gay best friend, Graham, this makes for a surface skimming yarn that never quite digs the depths beyond but which remains an intermittently fascinating homage. With a big screen remake of Schroeder’s original mooted for some time now, Reid’s play has already got in on the ground floor.


The Herald, June 6th 2026

 

ends

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