Frankie Thompson: Horrible Things review – a show to make you shudder with laughter
From Jacob Rees-Mogg as a child to Frank Sinatra’s ego in space, this is a wild collage of clowning and performance art
There are plenty of works-in-progress on the fringe. Frankie Thompson insists (or has the voice of Peppa Pig do so) that her show is a work-in-regress, an expunging of Horrible Things from the deepest recesses of her, and our, recollection. Thompson, whose brand of clowning-meets-performance art more or less guarantees something interesting will happen on stage, parades these Things as lip-synced audio and audience-terrorising stunts, all marshalled by our brisk and wild-eyed host, brooking no nonsense in a polka-dot dress.
Women in the crowd can relax: Thompson’s Horrible Things are usually male, her victims in the crowd likewise. The first sketch sound clips an interview with 12-year-old Jacob Rees-Mogg, and if you ever doubted lip-sync as an art form, I offer you Thompson’s performance here as the very junior minister. As his every word damns the way this country’s ruling classes are raised, her hyper-expressive face and nanosecond-precise timing pass sharper commentary than a thousand satirical words ever could.
There’s more where this came from: a collage of interviews laying bare the tawdry machismo of the whips’ office; a skit questioning the wholesomeness of Cliff Richard and his Summer Holiday. Occasionally, the theme is diluted, with a song about paint sample names, say. But there’s always another shudder of horrible around the corner, as when Thompson recruits a mime orchestra from the audience to accompany a recording of Frank Sinatra’s bizarre 1980 release Trilogy: Past Present Future, the final album of which is a sci-fi fantasia of the male ego unleashed, in which Ol’ Blue Eyes disappears entirely up his own Uranus.
Revenge is then wreaked on the men present in several interactive interludes, in which chaps are dragooned on stage to dance, be babies, be stabbed, be expelled from the room. I will never love members of the public looking ill-at-ease on stage, but if it must happen, let it happen in the hands of a comic as adroit as Thompson – who backs herself into uncomfortable corners too, now licking the floor, now lathering herself in shaving cream. By doing so, in this airing of some dank corners of our cultural memory, she posits laughter not as the best medicine, but the best exorcism.
At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 30 August. Then at Soho theatre, London, 9-21 November.