There is a phrase that recurs in Fixing like a mechanic's mantra: 'holistic car care, going on a journey — together'. By the time Matt Miller's 75 minutes are up, you realise that sentence has done rather a lot of quiet, patient work.

The Ripon Theatre Festival could hardly have wished for a more propitious launch event. Miller's solo show — written and performed with disarming precision — arrived to an audience already primed by the festival's buoyant launch, and Fixing rewarded their enthusiasm in full. This is theatre that earns its warmth.

The conceit is elegant. When Matt was small, his father bought a 1952 Sunbeam Talbot Mark II — a classic car, the kind that carries the promise of shared weekends, oil-stained hands, and a father-and-child project. The promise was never kept. Dad had just navigated a divorce; the car mouldered in a garage; life moved on in that slightly sideways way it does after families fracture. Now in his thirties, Matt wants to understand engines. He also wants to understand his father and that particular pocket of time when closeness and loss arrived together.

He cannot do this alone — which presents a structural challenge for a one-person show. Enter Natalie Spanner: Matt's drag alter ego, resplendent in yellow platforms, expert in all things automotive and emotionally astute in ways that the double entendres barely conceal. Natalie is a lecturer in car maintenance, and she has a syllabus: an eight-week course, each session building on the last, as any good mechanic's training should. She is fixing — naturally — a vintage Sunbeam Talbot. But the curriculum, it gradually becomes clear, extends well beyond the engine bay. The eight-week framework gives the show a pleasing structural backbone, a sense of sessions attended and lessons absorbed, as the technical and the personal are stripped down and examined side by side.

Natalie Spanner

Matt Miller

Miller moves between Matt and Natalie with remarkable economy: a jumper removed, a posture shifted, and we are somewhere else entirely. The performance has an air of authentic inhabiting rather than mere costuming, and Natalie's relationship with the audience begins immediately and never loses its chemistry. There is plentiful participation — sumps, spark plugs, and the collective percussion of an audience coaxed into voicing an engine's ignition sequence — but Miller is thoughtful enough to give the house a quiet opt-out signal that sidesteps awkwardness entirely, leaving the fun intact without coercion.

Miller's comic timing is at its sharpest when Natalie reaches for the horn. A single, well-placed honk becomes a nod to one of Ripon's most ancient civic traditions — the nightly setting of the watch at the mayor's house, after the city's hornblower has sounded the instrument at the obelisk in the market square. The reference, aimed with precision at the mayor in the audience, is the kind of thing that makes a touring show feel, just for an instant, as though it was written entirely for this room.

Underneath the double entendres and the car-maintenance pedagogy, the emotional architecture is carefully constructed. Miller's father is present through advice recalled, through silence, and through a sister – Ruby – who became the sibling bond that carried them both. What emerges is something both specific and universal: a meditation on repair, on the things we meant to do together that we never did, and on whether—in an increasingly fractured world— restoration is still possible. The show poses its question without sentimentality: How can we repair ourselves and each other?

The tender moments land without strain. Miller's face, mobile and confiding, carries the story between the lines; the hand gestures have a quality of eloquence that the words sometimes deliberately defer to. There is misdirection here, of a sort — moments where you think you are watching comedy and find you have been moved instead.

Fixing is an engaging, light-hearted celebration of queer identity and a genuinely affecting piece of personal theatre, all at once. That it achieves both in a small city's intimate festival space, with such ease and such generosity, suggests a show with a considerable future ahead of it.

A journey well worth taking.

Catch Fixing at The Lowry Salford 10th April. Details click here

and
Slung Low, The Warehouse, Holbeck, Leeds 11th April. Details click here.

For more on Ripon Theatre Festival click here