I’m 35. It’s terrifying, obviously. It’s a bit like when you’re 21 and you’ve just graduated from university and you announce: ‘Here I am
While life has a bit more of a regular, self-determined shape to it at 35, in some ways that confounding array of infinite possibilities opens up again. Get married? have a civil partnership? co-habit? explore the joy of being alone? Kids, No Kids? Adopt? What kind of person do I want to be in five years? or ten? will those life choices be compatible with my career goals? Will I be a bad parent? What if I can’t have children? What about the environmental impact of those choices?
And then you start doing the maths. Like Rachel in Friends on her 30th birthday:
“If I want to have a kid when I’m 35 that means I don’t have to get married until I’m 34, which gives Prada four years to start making maternity wear.”
Maddy, played with superhuman levels of energy by Grace Chapman is celebrating her 30th birthday by running a marathon – tied to a balloon.
It’s an interesting coincidence that the ominous thirtieth birthday balloon appears elsewhere – in the new reworking of Sondheim’s Company at the moment too, with a confused female Bobby (Rosalie Craig) looking at her smugly coupled friends and wondering what she’s missing.
Maddy, like Bobby, is feeling the pressure. The pressure of the ClearBlue adverts on her YouTube channel, of her best friend not seeing her any more now she has a family, of her boyfriend of five years proposing – and she doesn’t know whether to say yes or no.
Like most of the shows at the Vault Festival, It’s Not A Sprint, directed with tongue firmly in cheek by Ellie Simpson, doesn’t have a mega-budget to play with. Yet with a balloon and some glitter, and oodles of superb physicality and a really genuine warmth from Chapman, it conveys a similar message to Marianne Elliot’s Company – women have been told they can have it all, yet at 30, they’re discovering a glass wall is being thrown up in front of them, and running away from it won’t make it disappear.