Review by Jay Richardson

Featuring somewhere in the region of 50 exquisitely drawn characters, Defender of Earth is an impressive calling card for Gemma Arrowsmith’s acting prowess. As half of sketch duo Mould & Arrowsmith, she’s delivered a series of geeky, intellectually flattering Fringe shows. But this compelling and intricate one-woman narrative engages the heart as well as the brain.

After a none-too-original, but well-executed, spoof of Hollywood trailers, featuring a defiant Florence Nightingale battling war, disease and sexism, Arrowsmith, with an affectionate nod towards Star Trek, establishes her ‘humanity on trial’ storyline.

A call centre drone with no opinions, a useless degree and an unused gym membership, Lucy Raven is completely unremarkable, a self-deprecating slight on her creator but otherwise so average as to make no impression on the world whatsoever.

Yet it’s precisely this averageness that makes her of interest to a superior alien life form, The Jury, who as judge and booming prosecution too, suddenly demands that this mediocre Everywoman defends humanity against charges of barbarism. Drawing upon a fair amount of exposition to get to this point, Arrowsmith nevertheless keeps her tale pacey and the plot’s pot boiling.

Her failure would result in annihilation of the species, so the scene is set for argument and counter-argument, Arrowsmith bringing to life a rich gallery of the exemplary and the less so. Fleetingly, these include the likes of Jeremy Clarkson, Steve Jobs and Cheryl Cole, the latter re-imagined as rigorously challenging the pseudo-science behind her hair product commercials.

In a similar vein, there’s the beauty contestant who resists the bimbo stereotype with a dense, existential argument for why she’s participating in the competition. Generally though, this is about as broad a spectrum of civilisation as you could conceive, including an aggressive, spoilt child, a self-help guru con-artist, a monstrous career woman and a braying pack of desperate publishing executives. One of the more memorable portraits is a touchingly wide-eyed depiction of Laika, the first dog the Soviet Union blasted into space.

Elsewhere, the snapshot of a troubled child packed off to boarding school and a succession of Raven’s brutally critical teachers suggests an intriguing glimpse behind Arrowsmith’s own adolescence. Capable of calling on a dizzying array of accents and leaping between characters with smooth, subtle shifts in mannerism, this is something of a masterclass from a likeable performer who’s never so actorly that she can’t break the fourth wall every now and then to grumble about the difficulty of crafting a particular scene.

Her script would benefit from considerably more gags and you watch rapt for long sequences without laughing. But The Jury’s intimidating starchiness is gradually and amusingly undermined and there’s a deft satirical swipe at recent television output in the UK. Best of all are some lovely, nerdy in-jokes about consumer technology, in particular a running jest about e-publishing developments that Arrowsmith sustains with ingenious wit and admirable commitment to her conceit. When posterity comes to judge her, she’ll be able to look back on this promising solo debut with pride.

Review date: 26 Aug 2012
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Le Monde