PODCAST REVIEW: MEGAN.

BABY blues once removed: ‘Megan’ in ‘The End of the Line’, played by Victoria Emslie. Photograph courtesy Ink Jockey.

SO, YOUR BEST friend finds herself “up the duff”. And you, who have decided that you will not have children, need to respond. This is the dilemma of Megan, played by Victoria Emslie, the sixth in the series of monologues, The End of the Line, written and edited by Mark Heywood.

While, like the other episodes before her, Megan is written with a taut hand, effectively it is very bitter. She’s not a character at ease to say the last caveat in the piece up front, but needs to vent spleen on how her friendship with her best friend will wane over the years to come. Seemingly unable to empathise at all with the life decisions of other people, she is moored and trapped, very defensively, in the earnestness of her own.

Further to that, she feels very young and quite unsophisticated in her thinking and her snap judgements. “What will they think of next?” she responds to the idea of one body containing another life.  In another phrase, she refers to her friend’s pregnancy as “not normal”.  Ultimately, Megan feels like a friend who needs help to make intellectual peace with her own decisions.

At 25 she is projecting a future for herself based on assumptions that she is making about what other people may think about her. In truth, from the few minutes we get of her, she is afraid of losing her friends to their young and growing families. But she’s so filled with brittle bravado and belief in stark realities, that she seems neither willing nor able to see the blurry sides of all these perspectives.

Having said that, Megan raises provocative issues passionately discussable in any context. Listen here.

• Megan is written and directed by Mark Heywood and features technical input by Hetty Hodgson. With music by Daisy Chute and Cerian of the Heard Collective, it is performed by Victoria Emslie and it is the fifth in a series of podcasts collectively called The End of the Line, an Ink Jockey production.