Shoe Lady review, Royal Court: Katherine Parkinson is brilliant in this sickeningly compelling play

A relentless capitalist work culture abstracts everything around Viv, the shoeless woman at the centre of this production by EV Crowe

Parkinson relishes the text, playing with it like putty, voice tremulous, always just on the cusp of breaking (Manuel Harlan)

★★★★☆

There’s more than a touch of Beckett to Shoe Lady. Starring the excellent, brittle Katherine Parkinson as Viv, the shoe(less) lady, EV Crowe’s newest play is a queasily existential piece of work.

Viv is a modern, middle-class woman unmoored. Quite literally – she’s an estate agent who’s staggering through her day, having lost one of her shoes. Caught off balance, she attempts to regain some semblance of control, hobbling out of her house to a shoe shop, a café, her son’s birthday party – but most pressingly, to work. Viv is terrified of losing work. “I get so scared about how close we live to not being able to live,” she confesses. “It’s incredibly hard not to sink to the bottom.”