Lucy McCormick: Post-Popular

VENUE: Pleasance Courtyard

TIME: 8pm – 9pm, 31 Jul – 25 Aug, not 7, 12, 19

TICKETS: £12 – £14

How’s this for a horrible history or two? Having given the New Testament a kick up the backside three years ago in Triple Threat, exposing every corner and crevice of the body of Christ, Lucy McCormick has turned her trashy aesthetic on the world’s greatest women. Herself very much included.

Hitler’s Tasters

VENUE: Greenside @ Infirmary Street

TIME: 6:35pm – 7:35pm, 2–24 Aug, not 11, 18

TICKETS: £11 iPhones, blasts of modern music and the American twangs of the cast help to make the play’s point about how easy complicity can be. The anachronism is intriguing, but the repetitive looping structure keeps it from building to any greater significance. Snatched up by the SS, the girls raise questions about Nazism and the grim, frightening work they never signed up for, but quickly fall back into hero worship of the Führer

Mean Girls meets the Third Reich in this dark comedy about the young women selected to check Hitler’s food for poison during the Second World War. The girls are quickly at each others’ throats. But just as soon as they start in on each other, they stop, smile, and take a selfie.

Within minutes, her lips are locked around a backing dancer’s forbidden fruit – long before she’s stripped off to play Eve. Queen Boudicca comes daubed in blueberry war paint, clambering into a chariot, arse in half her audiences’ face. Anne Boleyn near drowns as ketchup pours out of her axe-wound. Each gets their own dance break and appropriate pop anthem combo.

This time, however, there’s nothing too much at stake: no blasphemy in the clash of subject and style; no rebellion in reclaiming this material for modern tastes. In fact, her outré approach only overwhelms her subject –something McCormick’s all too aware of. Her egotistical diva comes to the fore at the expense of her feminism and the show slowly breaks down.

McCormick remains a killer performer with real ramshackle, unpredictable charisma, but she’s caught between shock and a hard place here. Having made her name pushing the envelope, she’s no longer sure what message she wants to send. Post-Popular unravels into a show about creative paralysis, an artist wrestling with her own legend. Still too slack to get away with such self-indulgence, it’s a structural twist short of any kind of solution. Without that, Post-Popular looks a little past caring. ✏︎ Matt

Trueman

to distract themselves. It’s a pattern that repeats itself almost to absurdity and frustration – a thoughtful take on fascism, but a shallow take on teenage girls.

Dance sequences between scenes don’t add anything that can’t be gleaned from the dialogue, but the constant costume changes, each offering a flash of the swastikas sewn into their vests, feel more purposeful.

The comedy is biting, although a line about “making Germany great again” is much too predictable. Walking a line between building sympathy for the girls and exposing their hatefulness, the script sometimes treads too heavily on either side: “Jews, we don’t like Jews, right?” asks one, as if it was ever in question. At moments the show becomes truly fascinating and grotesque. Afterwards, however, it’s difficult to feel for the girls when they fall, once again, under the attention of the SS. ✏︎ Frankie

Goodway