Sara Pascoe’s whimsical title serves at least two purposes, with “gloop” presaging this show’s icky viscosity. Plentiful are the references to shit, snot and spillages that the comic finds encrusting her home and softplays the length and breadth of the UK since becoming a mother to two young boys, locked in a Sisyphean labour of forever wiping down surfaces, always wiping.
Yet that quality of amorphous, unidentifiable glop also applies to Pascoe herself, struggling to redefine herself since getting married and starting a family. In Greek myth, at least Sisyphus knew his purpose and got plenty of fresh air.
Over 90 minutes, the angsty but always thoughtful Pascoe brings a typically scholarly approach to subjects such as pornography, overturning her own preconceptions. And she name-drops the philosopher Albert Camus, albeit with a light, silly touch.
But when she describes the feeling of being uncertain of the essence inside her body, the hazily understood experience of looking out from behind one’s eyes, her existential panic is imparted in the most engagingly relatable ways. Despite featuring in one of the best television series of the moment, Last One Laughing, her dreadful performance essentially reduced her to being a mere audience member anyway.
Something else that Pascoe accomplishes terrifically well, which not all comics that settle down do, is she succinctly and unsentimentally suggests her love for her husband and children at the top of the show (emphasising his Australian need for a visa and their IVF process to conceive), leaving the overwhelming majority of the time she has on stage to vociferously decry and denounce them.
She never personalises them beyond the abstract, even though her spouse is relatively well-known and easily discovered online. Instead, it suits her purpose to keep him anonymous and simply project him as an oversized manchild with arrested development.
And while there’s obvious exaggeration and comic licence in her consistently stumbling over his big clown shoes, her frustration at the division of household chores and the weaponised incompetence of men in general feels rather closer to the bone.
Peppa Pig’s father, Daddy Pig, may be the exemplar of this. But Pascoe highlights the issue as so firmly entrenched in society that it’s practically an anthropomorphic truism, convincing her of the benefits of willingly sharing her husband with other women, if only to delegate some of the drudgery and admin.
Harshly comparing her youngest child to one of Hollywood’s least conventionally attractive actors, she carefully limits such superficial snipes for maximum effect, laying the groundwork for successive, well-timed callbacks. And Pascoe is even more remorseless about herself, noting that a side-effect of fame has been reinforcing just how much she looks like one of the UK’s most infamous celebrity monsters.
As the Last One Laughing debacle demonstrates, Pascoe retains an insider-outsider relationship with fame and manifesting success. As a deluded teen, lusting after Take That, she doggedly pursued a para-social relationship with Robbie Williams to the point where their marriage felt only a matter of time. And crazily, she wasn’t so misguided. Her masterplan mirrored her parents’ own dubious courtship. And ultimately, it bore some fruit. Until her kids once again blocked her happiness.
I Am A Strange Gloop doesn’t have the big explicit theme and academically framed focus that Pascoe’s pre-children shows had, with the pornography section a rounded, empathetic throwback to some of her more overtly feminist offerings. Generally, its domestic trappings and frustrations with being subsumed as an individual seek more universal appeal.
Regardless, eclectic diversions into Gwyneth Paltrow’s skiing accident; Paula Radcliffe’s resilience and Bryan Johnson’s insane experiments to resist ageing all share a preoccupation with retaining one’s last vestiges of dignity in the face of intense scrutiny and pressure.
Likewise, Pascoe’s scrambling dispatches from motherhood, the troughs, peaks and yet more troughs, are strongly expressed in her despairing, desperately imploring howl to be seen as something more than simply cook, cleaner and bogey receptacle, delivering a consistently funny union of frazzled form and content.
Tours until 29 March 2026 | Image: Contributed
