Superb satire of prejudice and expectation at the edge of farce.
This hasn’t been a particularly political fringe. Given societal collapse due to climate change is predicted in twenty years at best, one might have expected a few more howls at the unsustainability of the status quo.
Thank god, then, for Jen Ives, whose bitingly savage material about the straightjacket of mainstream culture floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee in a gender-segregated toilet.
Ives is performing as part of The Actors’ excellent Queer Weekender, but there must have been some kind of mistake. Because she’s straight now.
Our heroine comes on stage, heavily pregnant, to objectively the straightest band ever: The Killers. Or at least, she does second time around, the tech person forgetting to play it initially. If anything, this makes her entrance even funnier.
She asks if there are any straight people in the room, and The Reviews Hub is the only person to raise their hand. For this, I am moved front and centre, as this show is specifically for me.
For those who don’t know, some important context: Jen Ives is a trailblazing comedian and comedy writer who happens to be trans. An extremely assured performer, her latest hour is her funniest, cleverest, and most important work yet.
Armed only with a glass of wine (drinking while pregnant is an honourable straight tradition), Ives speaks proudly of her husband (in the army) and her adaptation to straight life. Sure, she still likes the gays and whatever – she’s just moved on to better, less queer things.
Here Ives embodies the persona of a bigot who is trying to sound inclusive so perfectly that half of the room doesn’t know what to make of it. Gradually, they cotton on to what she is doing, long before our comedian lays into a lovely-seeming identical twin in the audience, because, well, identical twins are just freaks, right?
This version of Ives gradually crumbles into one who is just desperate to get on Live At The Apollo, but this is a persona too: the mock-straight material, sanitised for a tv audience, is hilarious and scarily believable, until the real Ives – perhaps – emerges to tell us she knows plenty of people who have been on. They started out at the same time as her. Are they as funny? I doubt it.
By the end, Ives even manages to subvert the limitations of what a queer show is allowed to be, with a fabulous finale which is rapturously received. She is giving the people what they want, while reminding us that perhaps it might be time to be wanting for something more.
Reviewed on 26th May
The Reviews Hub Score
Superb Satire
