The reviews are in for You’re So Special, Julia Grogan’s one-woman follow-up to Playfight, running at Soho Theatre until 26 September in a production directed by Rachel Lemon. Grogan plays Miss June, a woman who teaches baby ballet in a church hall while waiting for the break that will make her famous, and who loses what grip she has when the break evaporates. The critics agree on Grogan herself – her writing, her comic timing and her miming of a room full of invisible toddlers are praised in every notice. Where they split is on the shape of the evening: some find the seventy minutes deftly stacked and genuinely unnerving, others find the scenes running into one another faster than the story can carry.
The verdict: seven reviews in so far – four four-star notices, one three-star, one two-star, and one outlet that publishes no rating. Among those that do score, the average is 3.5 out of 5, and every one of them praises Julia Grogan’s performance, whatever it makes of the play around her.
What are critics saying about You’re So Special?
The Guardian
“Painfully funny tragedy of a stardom seeker”
Reviewer: Anya Ryan
Despite being alone on stage, Grogan conjures a vivid whole world. The personalities of the mind-drifting kids are unmistakable through her expert miming, and never once do we doubt her frantic, deep need to reach for higher things. Grogan is a wonderfully watchable actor – you don’t dare look away for fear of missing another flash of a breakdown. She is also painfully funny. Miss June’s career may have stagnated but Grogan is doing brilliant things.
The Reviews Hub
Reviewer: Scott Matthewman
All this would be unbearable if June were actually as unlikeable and intolerable as she is smug and scornful. Instead, Grogan lets us see the layer of vulnerability around which her character has built such a hard shell. As the end-of-term sharing approaches, and June gets ever more hyper when she realises that one parent who will be in attendance is a hotshot Netflix producer, Grogan grounds June’s increasing desperation to be noticed, to escape, in an understandable level of insecurity. Creating a character as monstrous as June while still making us root for her is a delicate balancing act, but it’s a line that Grogan treads with skill and apparent ease.
West End Best Friend
Reviewer: Oli Burgin
The script is the strength of the play: bittersweet and original, surprising while still sounding naturalistic, and funny until it's a little heartbreaking. Grogan’s pantomiming of wrangling 2-year-olds reliably pulled laughs from the audience, and her physicality never let the stage seem empty. The performance comes across as a desperate demand for attention in a way that feels fitting. The dense, disheartening centre of a play about self-delusion and fame is well-balanced with its pleasingly unusual premise.
LondonTheatre1
Reviewer: Chris Omaweng
The seventy-minute show is divided into four acts and an epilogue, and to the show’s credit, the last scene is the best and funniest of all. Somewhat unusually, it’s a single-performer show that doesn’t directly give voice to other characters, leaving the audience only ever hearing one side of any given conversation. This is not a character that takes criticism well – a parent who wishes to withdraw their child from her class is effectively threatened with fire and brimstone, and what might reasonably be interpreted as a decline in psychological wellbeing could equally be interpreted as the continuation of an insatiable desire to chase fame and fortune, at almost any cost.
All That Dazzles
“Julia Grogan’s wit and committed performance cannot rescue muddled writing, confusing direction and a frustrating lack of clarity”
Reviewer: Sam Woodward
Grogan throws everything at her performance, but unfortunately that is part of the problem. Across roughly 65 minutes, she rushes through numerous scenes, locations and conversations without allowing many of them room to develop. Miss June comes across as selfish, desperate and delusional, apparently nearing a breakdown as her dream of stardom refuses to die. Grogan commits fearlessly and whimsically to that desperation, while Aline David’s movement coaching supports her well-timed physical humour and the whimsical way she parades around the stage. Yet the near-constant intensity gives the character nowhere to build. Snippets of song from Les Misérables, dance breaks and the arrival of a helmet, breastplate and sword add still more ideas. The armour may be intended to turn Miss June’s pursuit of fame into a literal battle, but the image is not prepared or integrated well enough to land. The production seems to know what each flourish represents, but rarely allows the audience to feel why it belongs.
Theatre Weekly
“A deft, theatrical and utterly contemporary story”
Reviewer: George Rennie
With fast-paced wit, some brilliantly pitched teacherly quirks and a cinematic blend of visuals, the heady comedy drama captures the toxifying frustrations of trying to ‘make it’ in the arts, playfully revealing the sadness and desperation of people who live only to be seen.
Production photographs by Alex Brenner.
Also reviewed by: The Stage (Holly O’Mahony, four stars, “Playfully laced with melodrama”), whose review sits behind a paywall.
For more of what the critics made of this month’s openings, see our roundups of Kimberly Akimbo at Hampstead Theatre, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf at the Yard Theatre and Jane Eyre at Southwark Playhouse Elephant.
You’re So Special runs at Soho Theatre, Dean Street, until 26 September 2026.
