It is New Year’s Eve, 1999. A couple, Mark and Christina, is attending a party at a remote cabin, but their relationship is on the brink of collapse. When Christina drives home from the party after breaking up with Mark, a life-threatening accident with a deer causes the couple to revisit their whole relationship through flashbacks.
Such a scenario could be a tender exploration of relationship dynamics. It could also be a romantic comedy with a tender edge. When it springs from the mind of acclaimed clown Natalie Palamides, it’s also an anarchic 85 minutes of absolutely bonkers mayhem.
Palamides plays both Mark and Christina. Her right side is scruffily bearded, dressed in a checked shirt and baggy jeans; on her left, Christina’s fuchsia-pink dress and long hair. The performer swivels from side to side to portray each character, a trick with a long tradition in music halls and beyond. Here, it quickly feels less like a gimmick and more like a way to create two complementary characters.
As Palamides alternates between her two roles as they fight, meet in flashback and even have sex, we always feel that the other is present, thanks to her ability to use her arms and hands as a proxy for the “missing” character in the duo. Palamides’s stage presence is enhanced by extensive, goofy use of multiple props, which are pulled apart and discarded as needed. Furniture and props are used and flung away, a chaotic mess that is as precisely created as it feels the opposite.
The odd name for the show comes from a speech impediment that Mark has inherited from his great-grandfather, a hunter (famous to anyone who has ever enjoyed a Bugs Bunny cartoon) whose rhoticism results in words pronounced as if they start with a W. Palamides extends this from the obvious words like “wabbits” to “weer” for “deer”, another example of her comedy always relying on being a sidestep away from reality.
The name also plays on “we’re”, a word that often bounces between Mark and Christina as they struggle to define their relationship. The romcom elements play on the genre’s tropes, from an original meet-cute to the second meeting that sparks their relationship. Palamides also bounds into the audience, frequently rotating so everyone can get a decent angle of each character, and prompts several members to improvise on the spot. It’s all very much a communal sense of clownish partying, although nobody in the audience could hope to elevate themselves to Palamides’s level.
If there is a message in WEER’s violent romcom chaos, at times it struggles to be seen amid the freneticism. Perhaps a clue is in a scene that extols the virtue of Pearl Jam’s cover of Last Kiss, a 1960s song about a man who finds his girlfriend unconscious at the site of a road accident. It is a song that mixes romance, death and everything in between – and while Pearl Jam’s version was never a hit in Britain, it feels like Palamides’s gloriously stupid, clownish take on a similar story is right up our street. As Mark’s great-grandfather, Elmer Fudd, might say, there’s a wot to wuv.
Runs until 24 January 2026
