Powerful, provocative and wrenching
Luisa Omielan: Politics for Bitches
Gilded Balloon began, cataloguing the mountingly frustrating battle to get a GP’S referral, the months of waiting for a colonoscopy appointment that didn’t materialise before the rush to A&E and the devastating confirmation (again delayed) that it was all too late. Continuing in this heartbreaking vein, she concluded: “I am watching my mother have the most undignified, painful, slow, cruel death imaginable.”
One year after her mother died, Omielan’s latest show, Politics for Bitches, contains – impressively, heroically – copious quantities of the old Luisa: ebullient, garrulous, uninhibited, relaxed, very sweary. But there’s a rawness and awakened anger that has resulted in her most affecting show to date and one of the most powerful and provocative hours on the Fringe. “I know this isn’t the show you came for, but it’s the show you’re getting – you may as well get on-board,” she urges. She has always found politics boring, she admits, talking up her own ignorance: “It took me ages to work out the difference between the Tories and the Conservatives. If you laughed at that, you’re too advanced for this show!”
She turns that lack of understanding on its head, though; this is a quest to find out where the money’s going, who’s representing us.
Armed with a whiteboard and pen, totting up government spending figures, she’s lethally funny on such staples of indignation as MPS’ salaries and the public school domination of the professions.
Bit by bit, via entertaining whining about the lack of affluence in her life – despite all the dutiful hard work – to a very risqué revisionist look at Mary Magdalene, with multiple barbs about the sexes along the way, she outlines a disconnect between the people running the show and ordinary taxpayers.
By the time she gets to the section on her mother, she has paid her dues in terms of laughs, and we get something almost shocking: a tearful, plaintive stream-of-consciousness. The state failed her mother in her dying days; she relives that trauma, finally quoting a nurse who said:
“I love the NHS and I hate what it has become.” At the last minute, she wrests mirth from the jaws of sadness – miming her and her sister’s awkwardness and confusion around the death-bed – but it’s wrenching stuff. Essential viewing.