Gin cabaret is a real tonic
“Stay in your shell and shut up,” people say. Or “Where’s the chicken?” She’s an egg, standing on stage underneath the green yellow club lighting of the Bourbon Bar’s womb-like arches. A mysterious, disembodied voice speaks: “The egg is the symbolic of creation; the vessel great work is consummated in.”
Normally the punchline of jokes, here the egg reclaims its image: as the giver of life and a symbol of womanhood – but is funny in the way anyone who “hatches” out of a shell, and runs, chicken-like, around the room can’t really not be. Through the story of a “rebirth”, this curious creature tries to achieve her “potential” in a world where people like her “aren’t given a seat at the table – but they are allowed to clear that table”.
Creator Theodora van der Beek is a brilliantly understated comic writer and performer who draws on the work of Andy Warhol and Lady Gaga, as well as the punk spirit of Deborah Harry and the Sex Pistols to create a highly original stripped-back sci-fi comic-tragedy, delivered with the dry, self-knowing narration of a piece of pulp fiction.
Tim Spooner’s outlandish but ethereal costume enables our aspiring heroine to waddle, clown-like and wideeyed in a plastic membrane that renders her simultaneously sad and surreally funny. “You stupid whore,” says the robotic voice of her godlike shell, as she embraces the idea that her value can only be measured by the volume of men’s whistles when she eats a banana.
Ultimately she fails to become the woman she was meant to be. However, lying dying in her own egg white, she finally sees the limitations others have placed on her: “Inside the chicken, I crossed a road.” Rarely has an egg joke been used to create such a melancholic, joyful and profound conclusion to a truly original play.
Mother’s Ruin: A Cabaret about Gin
Gilded Balloon at Rose Theatre (Venue 76)
If cabaret had a national drink, it would be gin. Many of the form’s devotees are deeply attached to the tipple so the creators of Mother’s Ruin: A Cabaret about Gin have a lot to live up to.
Happily, they more than deliver, presenting an effervescent showcase that combines barnstorming musical numbers and confident, relaxed Vino packs an impressively wide range of character work, lived experience and social commentary into the 30-odd minutes of Auntie.
The semi-autobiographical show offers a kaleidoscopic take on di Vino’s experiences as a mixed-race young gay man, from the different challenges associated with British and African heritage to the frustrations of living in rapidly gentrifying east London.
The main figures are proud, boisterous, insult-happy “Kengerian” Auntie, whose fierceness doesn’t quite mask her own oppression, and her son Mtoto, whose difference Auntie can’t abide even as he struggles to find somewhere else to fit in. There are also funny, deliberately awkward encounters with a wellmeaning humour with intriguing historical material, and recognition of the dark side of booze too.
The show is the creation of Maeve Marsden and Libby Wood, who are already on stage throwing around ginbased puns alongside their terrific accompanist Tom Dickins as we take our seats via the theatre’s complementary G&T station. (They had me at ‘Hello.’)
Like revivalist preachers, the duo induct us into the church of gin with a bastardised Lord’s Prayer before embarking on a multifaceted journey that moves from teacher and a patronising hipster party girl.
Di Vino smoothly and entertainingly embodies a range of types rarely seen on the Fringe, deftly sketching their foibles and interconnections to impressive cumulative effect while occasionally casting the audience as a church congregation or Hackney revellers.
The show might benefit from a stronger sense of narrative progression and more confident pacing. But Auntie remains engaging for the amusing, nuanced and nonjudgmental perspective it offers on lives too often reduced to caricatures or tokenistic gestures, if not ignored altogether. best-practice serving tips and cocktail origin stories to some surprisingly political history.
There are evocatively drawn lessons in the role gin has played in female oppression and liberation as well as colonial excursions from Peru to India, and even evidence of how the 18th-century rivalry between beer and gin gave the drink a bad name.
The heart of the show, though, is a storming set list that takes in numbers by Amy Winehouse, Martha Wainwright, Nina Simone and the Pretenders.
Daniel Piper’s Day Off
Underbelly (Venue 61)
“Alright!!!” A man in a club, clutching a WKD, is lurching towards me like it’s 1997. The man is Daniel Piper, this is his one-man show, and he’s about to live the dream and have a day off. The problem is that he can’t quite commit to this, or even decide what it really means in practice. Exercise? Travelling? Going on the London Eye?
Standing in Daniel’s way is the guilt he feels at leaving his colleagues to manage their own Twitter account and update the “content calendar”. As one-time social media manager of the Underbelly,
Many songs are given wittily repurposed lyrics: Peggy Lee’s “Fever”, for instance, gets a queasy malarial makeover while Johnny Cash’s “I’ve Been Everywhere”’ becomes a connoisseur’s anthem.
As well as demonstrating their talent across an impressive range of musical registers, Marsden and Wood maintain a spot-on balance of larky humour, bolshy political consciousness, palpable passion for their subject and sheer joie de vivre. Well worth raising a glass to. he clearly knows the petty foibles of office technophobes – and this comes across in the sharply observed script, which is full of recurring jokes.
A likeable performer, Daniel has a down-to-earth charm but also a chaotic kind of energy and direct-to-audience style of address that often feel more suited to a stand-up routine. The jokes are sharper than the storytelling, but the pressure we in the West face to find and follow “our dreams”, paired with the hold that work is increasingly taking of our home lives, touch on pertinent themes that have plenty of scope to be explored further.
Barauni Junction is one of India’s busiest railway stations, at the heart of the country in the industrial town of Barauni. It’s here that young Rukhsar moves with her family at the beginning of the play, and from where we are led through the pocket family saga which ensues – all of which is based on her sister’s thieving of shoes from the counter her granddad has set up to remind them at the entrance to the local place of worship (fortunately more Muslim than Hindu shoes have been taken, we are told, or there would be trouble) and her father’s journey to Kuwait to work as a labourer during the first Gulf War.
Written by emerging Indian playwright Abhishek Majumdar – whose work has been staged at the Royal Court – and performed by Radhikka Aggarwal, this is one of those most welcome of hidden Fringe gems, a show that takes its audience on an international journey deep into the heart of a lived experience from the other side of the world with which they may not be familiar.
Amid simple staging, Aggarwal’s monologue is involving and heartfelt, and Majumbar’s words capture a rich sense of the place and people involved.
This mixed-media show from Rooftops Productions offers a (very) potted portrait of the ethnic and political struggles which have blighted Zimbabwe/rhodesia over the last century, taking snapshots from four periods in its turbulent history.
For those without a working knowledge of the subject, badly edited and subtitled news footage can only do so much to illuminate. But what does emerge is the perennial theme of the exploitation of girls, each portrayed with innocence, exuberance and distress by two hard-working actresses plus a colleague on offstage drumming duties and vocal sound effects.