Performed by Stella Cohen

Review by Marina Funcasta

Everyone knows what it feels like to be thirteen: the endlessly distracted brain, hormonally charged, effervescent with ideas about who we are and who we wish we were; the nervous excitement that comes with being on the cusp of adolescence, as if growing up were like falling off a cliff, unsure what lurks beneath, uncertain whether we’ll even make it out alive. Being a thirteen-year-old’s mind is nothing short of, in a word; theatrical – trying on identities and personalities as if our entire social existence depended on it. Perfect content for a Fringe show, one could say.

A one-woman show anchored in the thoughts of a year 7 in the late noughties does, admittedly, sound unassuming, primarily when found in the Fringe catalogue beside ‘YOU ARE GOING TO DIE’, a nudist exploration of the horrors and misgivings of human existence. To be sure, while the message of ‘Yellow Corners’ is indubitably not as explicit as the latter is sure to have been, Calima Lunt Gomez’s script nonetheless hinges on a similarly existential crisis: thankfully remaining clothed throughout, we witness her protagonist indulge in a relentless hour-long rant, digressing into seemingly arbitrary observances on the walls of her new room, to whether anything else even exists, making her the most important person to have ever lived. 

And yet, Stella Cohen’s performance nevertheless generates an endearment that makes any moment of narcissism seem hilarious. The lack of self-awareness that comes with the age, captured in trails of thought, and the subsequent silences, humming or catatonic stares, provide Cohen with the perfect opportunity to showcase their immaculate comic timing. Genuinely, the audience doesn’t go 5 minutes without at least a hiccup of laughter.

Jokes aside, the play itself withholds much more substance than first expected. The genius of using a thirteen-year-old as a protagonist is that, unlike children, who know too little about society to even begin to comprehend its structures, and unlike teenagers, who think they know it all, it provides the fulcrum between two larger states under which adult concepts and feelings are still be observed but analysed in a childish way. The corruption of innocence is put under a microscope in a way that subconsciously reflects and relates back to the audience, disarming us in the process.