Tentacular Spectacular – Battersea Arts Centre, London

Creator: Oozing Gloop

The first thing that strikes you as you enter Battersea Arts Centre’s Council Chamber is the set. Designer Jenkin Van Zyl creates an intriguing multi-layered performance space, covered in a combination of camouflage netting and men’s ties, as if the forest has reached out to reclaim the city.

Amidst this, drag performer Oozing Gloop sits atop a mussed-up photocopier, her characteristic bright green face framed by wild hair adorned with detritus. Gloop converses with an offstage voice about the nature of beginnings – from starting out in drag, to how events don’t begin until you stop promising you’ll do something and actually do it.

Beginnings are often messy and not clean, though. So it is here too, for this conversation has already begun as the audience takes their seats. In time, Gloop’s disembodied conversation partner, fellow drag queen Olympia Bukkakis, joins her on stage for what could be deemed the “traditional” start of the show. The pair indulge in a little performance silliness, poking fun at how performers introduce each other. It all adds to the deconstruction of the narrative arcs that we paint ourselves into following.

Later on, the pair stand around a water cooler, exchanging one-sentence stories that remind the other of another story, each more outlandish than the next. The escalation of their stories, and their accompanying behaviour as they do everything with water from the cooler but drink it, take the banality of water cooler talk and elevate it into something hilarious.

Countering that levity are other moments that are substantially less so, especially from the other artists on the bill. Bonnie Bakenko lies on a bed, caressing their pregnancy belly made of clay; slowly, they claw into it, extracting wet, red strings of ribbon and beads before adorning a boned headdress with this synthetic viscera.

Coming as it does near the start of the show, it does tie into the concept of beginnings, but tonally the performance is so intensely different from the rest of the evening that its relevance feels less clear.

Concepts of business and nature, and the distortion of both, are picked up by other drag performers, Wet Mess and Shrek666. The former comes on stage dressed as a businessman in a baggy purple suit, gradually disrobing to reveal a rubber chest plate of the sort some drag queens use, flipped around so that the performer is flat-chested at the front with two tasselled breasts attached to their back. Shrek666’s look is the polar opposite, starting out as a goblin before ripping away the plastic of his full-body suit to reveal his own tattoo-filled body.

Neither performance is really a striptease; one could describe them as burlesque if that term were not overloaded with preconceptions about glamour that are deliciously subverted here.

But the show’s greatest moments come whenever the focus returns to Gloop or Bukkakis. Both give rousing monologues: Bukkakis muses first on why humans worry so much about extinction events coming from the sky – like the sort of asteroid that killed off the dinosaur – when Earth is just as capable of delivering destruction. Our planet is not Gaia, she muses, but Medea – the killer of her children rather than their protector.

Bukkakis also compares socio-political schisms to a tower in a swamp: conservatives live at the top of the tower, while everyone else is left to fend for themselves in the bog below. Gloop takes this metaphor and runs with it, conjuring up the image of a trans frog who thrives in the swamp and builds something great.

And gradually, the narrative comes back to storytelling. Mounting the photocopier once again, Gloop reminds us that while simplifying stories is tempting, such reductions harm minorities – gay people, trans people, the neurodiverse and those with disabilities.

It is this thesis, succinctly and rather beautifully expressed, that forms the backbone of Tentacular Spectacular’s success. The further the evening moves away from that, the harder it is to discern a message. But that’s the point: this show’s story is not simple, and it has told us why.

Continues until 17 June 2023