West End Reviews
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"...The great joy - and one great joy in an evening is surely enough - is the performance of Janie Dee as Jacie, a role she was born to play. She totters hilariously as a robotic machine unthawing into humanity and a love affair with Adam. She goes wild on the dance floor and elopes with Adam to a hotel where some of the play's sharpest, funniest scenes involve a snooty receptionist and waiter (both played by John Branwell). Suddenly overflowing, Adam (neat and likeable Matthew Cottle) has to dive under the napery and find her button below to empty the waste bag... A satire on television mixes cleverly with an old-fashioned romance. Instead of throwing off her spectacles, Jacie throws off her artistic straitjacket. And the delightful Miss Dee plays the full range of quirky comedy, blank vulnerability, sexual awakening and bursting high spirits with glorious glee and gusto. The last half hour drags and suddenly nothing is very funny at all, even when Jacie becomes regional director at the station with a terrifying instinct for the job. As the awesome Ayckbourn goes, this - his 53rd play - will not be one of his most unequivocal triumphs. Partly this is because there is always something curiously dated about futuristic triumphs..." The Daily Mail |
 Janie Dee as Jacie Tripplethree |
"...The trump card of [Ayckbourn's] latest West End creation is that it stars Janie Dee, an impishly brilliant actress who deserves much wider recognition. In this, she plays a female robot in a dystopian future where non-human "actoids" perform in TV soap operas. Okay, some would say that has already happened. But Ayckbourn's sci-fi satire personalises the joke by charting the dawning of a love affair between an actoid and her human tutor (Matthew Cottle)... Ms Dee is terrific as the jerky Jacie Tripplethree who discovers her circuitry giving way to the Painful emotions of womanhood. She is programmed in one fantastic scene to dance to ZZ Top. David Soul lumbers about as a slobbish TV director and there's a nice vampy Joan Collins-style cameo from Jacqueline King as the studio boss. Laughs and thoughtfulness come generously packaged in a play that locates a tenderness of heart beneath the hardware." The Express
 Scene from the Broadway Version "Seeing Janie Dee at the start of the decade in Show Boat, I tipped her for future stardom. Her performance as an awakening android in Alan Ayckbourn's Comic Potential, newly arrived from Scarborough, vividly vindicates my claim. This is a superb comic performance fit to be mentioned in the same breath as Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch or Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday... You can pick holes in the play's logic - why should comedy be endangered in a future where its treasures are instantly on tap? - but it has a manic inventiveness and Dee's performance is spellbinding. In her actoid phase, as a soap-opera nurse, she implies through her eyes alone extraordinary reserves of mischief. In the play's funniest scene, where Adam dives under the table of a posh restaurant to empty her system of surplus liquid, she emits strange gurgles of delight. Dee even makes sense of Jacie's humanisation by lending her a potent blend of pain, confusion and mutinous anger. She is excellently supported by Matthew Cottle as the amorous Adam and Jacqueline King as the TV station's villainous boss; less so by David Soul as a woozy Hollywood legend on the skids. But the good news is that Ayckbourn as writer-director, in his 53rd play, is still seriously funny, and he has written a role that shows Dee to be a bright, particular star." The Guardian |