Shaedates; Or How I Learned to Love Myself

After an award-winning performance in This Is Where We Live (Best Play at Fringe NYC 2014, ★★★★★ & Critics’ Pick in TimeOut New York), Shaelee Rooke is bringing her debut solo show Shaedates: or How I Learned to Love Myself (#Shaedates) to the Edinburgh Fringe.

Director Toby Hulse (**** WOS for War Game) and composer Jack Drewry join forces with Shaelee Rooke to create a tender, surreal and wildly imaginative comedy about a woman who finds love through dating herself. Blending comedy, clowning, and original music, this show is somewhere between the witty and incisive comedian Katherine Ryan, beloved weirdo Stuart Bowden and the Mighty Boosh.

In 2015 Shaelee’s actor husband got a job on a long-running West End show and they moved to London, leaving Shaelee lonely in a big city with a lot of free evenings. She began going out alone, joking she was dating herself. Inspired by the story of Grace Gelder (the woman who married herself) and other stories of romancing one’s self, Shaelee wrote and developed this show.

In the media and beyond self-love is often mocked, but Shaedates walks the precarious line between hilarity and profundity. It draws on all the clichés of modern dating to say something unexpectedly funny and wonderful in amongst jokes about novelty weddings, mind-blowingly stupid inspirational quotes and pectoral fins. Mindfulness has never been so funny.

See Shaedates; Or How I Learned to Love Myself at OXFORD on Friday 24 June, 10pm, Arts at the Old Fire Station (as part of Offbeat Festival) BOOKING LINK: http://www.oldfirestation.org.uk/event/shaedates-or-how-i-learned-to-love-myself/