Coming Clean ☆☆☆☆ Venue: Secret! Thursday 14th June 2018
Ethan Mechare swapped life as a TV presenter in Los Angeles to come to the UK to present his one-man show Coming Clean: Life as a Naked House Cleaner.
The show is performed in homes, pubs and cafes and the invite with the address is only sent out the day before which along with the title only adds to the sense of the forbidden. Tonight your intrepid Queerguru reviewer turns up clutching a bottle to a rather grand Victorian terrace in leafy north London.
The audience is about 25 strong and we are shown into the front room and squeeze onto the sofa, miscellaneous chairs and a couple of benches. The family pet (a large rescue Greyhound) refuses to leave and plonks himself down pretty much center stage.
Ethan starts by sharing his obsession with Oprah by reading pearls of wisdom from her magazine “When you invite people to your home you invite people to your self”. A reply from Oprah to a letter he sent as a child is preserved between two large blocks of perspex and treated with the same reverence as the Declaration of Independence.
Ethan introduces us to his twin passions of spot cleaning and being naked. How wonderful and visionary to combine the two as gainful employment and we are told he goes by the professional name of Earnest.
The show really takes off when he recounts (with many hilarious and surreally interesting asides) the extraordinary experiences he has when out at work and the characters he meets.
There’s Roy from Hornchurch in a flat that is filthy (to Earnest’s delight: “remember -dirty is hot”) and who still has his dead wife’s condolence cards on his mantelpiece!
Then there is Mike the amputee who it seems wants to leave his grubby fingerprints on more than the kitchens hard surfaces. Earnest muses with a duster in one hand and a hard-on in the other “Does this count as sexual harassment in the workplace”?
Earnest admits that there may be a fine line between being a niche service provider and a $90 whore. To Ethan’s credit, he keeps these and many other moral questions up in the air and spinning away through clever writing and by continuously digressing with anecdotes to illustrate or expand on a point. What are the boundaries of prostitution? Who hasn’t been bought or paid for a drink, a taxi home, a holiday?
It takes a particular kind of ambition to come all the way from Los Angeles to Gospel Oak but this works in Ethan’s favor as his American accent gives him an “other” quality that helps us uptight Brits to relax into the show’s format. His perky, glossy persona allows him to throw out a question or a fun fact to the audience and mold our answers to his purpose. We have all learned something tonight: Sploshing; Paraphilia; Scrotum waxing; Anal bleaching and the fact that a lady actually married the Eiffel Tower.
The size of the venue ensures it’s an intense experience but the show also invites you to question how you feel on all sorts of socio-sexual topics, as Ethan says: “Intimacy is when I can tell someone my inner fantasies without judgment”.
Ethan is a truly gifted storyteller – each tale rooted in experience flows rapidly and seamlessly leaving the audiences with jaws on the floor as we realize people are able to fetishize absolutely anything. “I became engrossed in the gross” and so were we Ethan – so were we!
P.S. To find out about the where and when of future performances check out http://comingcleantheshow.com/
REVIEW: JONNY WARD