Lucy McCormick Post Popular ☆☆☆☆☆
Soho Theatre, London

I didn’t see Lucy McCormick’s inaugural show, ‘Triple Threat’ but have seen her perform shorter pieces and was excited to see how her engagingly energetic and anarchic style would play out in longer form. I wasn’t disappointed.

From the get-go, this high-energy show takes the audience on a snarling, chaotic journey through women in history as McCormick searches for a hero, someone to inspire her as she inspires us. Her comment at the start that she specialises in historic re-enactments is both hilarious and yet, in a very twisted sense, true. I once saw her re-enact the birth of Jesus, playing both the part of mother and then infant.

Accompanied by two supporting players who are deadpan and sexy at the same time (SAMIR KENNEDY & RHYS HOLLIS), she presents us with four historical women: Eve, Queen Boudicca, Florence Nightingale, and Anne Boleyn. It’s certainly not for the faint-hearted. Within minutes, she’s in the enviable position of rimming the living daylights out of Samir Kennedy, and the culmination of the show is the removal of a Hero chocolate from her vagina (Hollis and Kennedy remove one from their buttholes).

All three display exceptional dancing skills and McCormick is in possession of a glorious singing voice, but the real skill on display here is her ability to get laughs from some very dark material and coax the audience into some extremely uncomfortable territory. When the microphone is passed through the crowd, who are encouraged to shout insults at Anne Boleyn, there’s some truly horrific and misogynistic name-calling.

She gets us laughing at death before claiming her recently deceased father would be proud of her because she’s been sucking a lot of dick recently. The whole thing is a glorious, hilarious riot. Catch it if you can.

Till Dec 14th and then Feb 10th-22nd
https://sohotheatre.com/

Review by Jonathan Kemp

Queerguru London Correspondent Jonathan Kemp writes fiction and non-fiction and teaches creative writing at Middlesex University. He is the author of two novels – London Triptych (2010), which won the 2011 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, and Ghosting (2015) – and the short-story collection Twentysix. (2011, all published by Myriad Editions). Non-fiction works include The Penetrated Male (2012) and Homotopia?: Gay Identity, Sameness and the Politics of Desire (2015, both Punctum Books).