It may not be the world's biggest surprise to walk into a Bridget Christie show and hear a blast of the mighty Fall but that doesn't mean it wasn't (a) a very welcome blast or (b) a promising omen for what turned out to be an interesting, enjoyable, and, most importantly of all, funny evening.
It was the first night of Bridget's two month long residency at the Leicester Square Theatre so if she slipped up a couple of times, took the odd wrong turn, or even seemed a bit rusty that's more than forgivable. The good outweighed the indifferent hugely but it'd still be interesting to return towards the end of the run and see how Christie's tinkered with it over that time frame.
I'm not complaining though (I laughed a lot, proper LOLs if not quite PMSLs or ROFLs - do people actually do that?). In fact, I'm leaving the 'complaining' to Bridget Christie. She's better at it than me. She makes it humorous (which is never a bad idea when having a whinge).
The premise of Christie's new show, What Now?, is that if she, a middle aged, middle class, white, heterosexual, cisgender mother of two (with self-closing cupboard doors and a Tate membership card), is stressed and anxious about the current state of the world then we must be in pretty dire straits.
As this is a comedy show and not a political lecture Christie, of course, plays up her own selfish concerns above any worries about what might happen to those less fortunate than her under the emerging autocracies. Thus, the Brexit vote, the rise of Trump and his subsequent idiocies, Putin's raising of untruth to an art form, and the nefarious, self-serving nature of Boris fucking Johnson are all refracted through the prism of Christie's relationship with her husband, her eleven and seven year old son and daughter, her (imaginary) friends, and her inability to even enjoy a Lush bom-bom bath bomb without becoming beset with existential despair about the state of the planet and those that rule it and what message that's sending out to future generations.
Although Christie jokes about her worst fears and most hated things being water, mushroom clouds, women, time, heights, and even slides it's clear that what she really hates and fears is lying. Now lying's become so trendy you don't even have to apologise when you've been caught demonstrably doing it - just tell an even bigger lie, she's fearful that this is releasing untold levels of angst into the public sphere.
Her style certainly seems to encompass her own anxieties. She jitters around the stage, stops sentences in mid-flow, goes off on digressions and tangents, and peppers her points with self-deprecating asides. She does comedy, basically, and she does it well.
There are hilarious sections on hiding her son's inhaler after he'd bored her with tales of Nerf guns and Dr Who, threatening to lock her daughter in a dark cupboard full of spiders after she'd coaxed Bridget to go down a rickety old water slide in Crete, and the undertakers' fear of closing the lid on Margaret Thatcher's coffin but there are also asides on the loneliness epidemic, male waxing, Harvey Weinstein's sexual aggressions, more casual male microaggressions, and how Peter Stringfellow's wish to be remembered as an ardent remainer is sure to be doomed.
Stringfellow just did too many other things for that to be his legacy and in a coruscating critique of those 'other things' he did Christie manages to show how Stringfellow, in all actions except that one remain vote, did as much as anyone to bring about the climate of fear and distrust that caused the rise of UKIP, the Tory party to move even further to the right, the tabloids to whip up distrust of immigrants, and the 52% to vote against their own best interests.
She's exaggerating for comedic effect, of course - you should know how comedy works by now, and it's one of the highlights of a show with several. A show that manages to find humour both in Putin's barefaced lying about the deadly Salisbury poisonings and in the image of a toddler bringing his own freshly shat out turd on a plate to his sister's birthday party while wearing nothing but a vest.
Christie makes a good case for us living in beleaguered times (David Davis, Ed Sheeran, Jeremy Corbyn if she could find him) but when she looks back to a golden age it's to David Mellor, Keith Vaz, and Lembit Opik reminding us that we've always had charlatans at the helm and that somehow we're still here.
So there is hope. Christie considers the state of her marriage and her relationship with her kids (she loves them, but more in the abstract than when they're actually with her) but, with a knowing aside, she lets us know that she's not really worried about these things. She's worried about the state of a world where someone like Silvio Belusconi appears a paragon of virtue from a gilded and bygone age and if there's nothing positive to take away from that at least Christie gets some good mileage riffing on her, and our, anxieties.
The whole show culminates in an imagined dialogue, that's more of a diatribe, with her daughter about how commercial, how infantilised, how demoralising, and, ultimately, how utterly amoral Valentine's Day is and how it's somehow representative of all that it absolutely bankrupt about society.
It's brilliant. The performance may have, necessarily, intentionally even, started off a bit rough round the edges but by the end Bridget Christie had the audience metaphorically, if not actually, rolling in the aisles and if you don't find this review funny? Well, it's not supposed to be. Go and see Bridget Christie instead (you've got over two months). She's the one with the jokes.
Thanks to Kathy for getting the tickets (just £2 with some 'magic' card she has) and to both her and Eva for joining me for a delightful evening in the Leicester Square Theatre and Yalla Yalla beforehand (possibly the best falafels in London and both the samboussek jibne and the mint tea were taste sensations). If we weren't being permitted to forget the problems of the world for one evening we were at least able to laugh at them. That'll do. For now.
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