Review: Queen C**t: Sacred or Profane?, Cube

“We are all mad,” says Frida Kahlo in this consistently hilarious, itchily uncategorisable creative adventure from Bristol duo Deborah Antoinette and China Blue Fish. “We have an unconscious part the patriarchy wants to suppress … the un-cunt-trollable.”

Kahlo is just one of a deranged riot of characters to appear in this 90-minute blend of sketch comedy, manifesto and group consciousness workshop, which sent the audience off into the snow with fire in their bellies and a new way of looking at one of society’s last taboo words.

Joining her on stage were a nightmarishly erotic Theresa May, who smeared herself in oil and humped the crowd as she extolled the virtues of fracking; a frazzled, gin-swigging Virgin Mary; and Mike Buchanan, head of the men’s rights party Justice for Men and Boys, here brought to monstrous life as a beer-belly-waggling, woman-loathing blowhard.

But the real star of the show is an enormous, well, cunt, which hangs at the back of the stage, parting, spurting and dispensing bouts of hedonistic wisdom in the person of Big Clit – played with delicious, devilish sensuality by Naomi Smyth, who at one point had us tonguing the air en masse.

In a nod to the first post-Weinstein Oscars, there’s a weepy acceptance speech from a woman who wants to thank her vagina, for everything really – and delivers a pointed flash of anger at her rapist. Meanwhile the Virgin Mary sketch – in which the Mother of God breaks ranks to complain about the Redeemer’s breastfeeding timetable, come out as queer and launch into Madonna karaoke – raises the question of whether sexual violence is built into the Bible myth. How much was Mary consulted on the Immaculate Conception? “I’m not a statue or an idol, I’m a woman,” she spits. “And I’m definitely not a fucking virgin.”

If the political barbs make it sound like a lecture, it isn’t in the slightest. Like their surrealist counterparts The Mighty Boosh, Antoinette and Fish are gifted performers who have the knack of taking the audience along for the ride, even when we’re not sure where they’re going or which sacred cows are going to be eviscerated next. Along with stage manager Maeve Bell – who combines her duties with a brilliantly goofy turn as Little Clit, played as if her body is one big nerve-ending – the duo have a background in physical theatre, and have the audience roaring as Buchanan and his sidekick writhe on the floor in their attempts to say the hated word ‘feminist’.

All pics: Tilly May Photography

After a late start due to the snow, this Saturday matinee performance suffered a few technical glitches, which Bell bluffed her way through admirably. One or two sketches didn’t quite hit home. Though I’ll never see Theresa May in the same way again, her segment felt less developed and might have brought in how political women from Thatcher to Clinton are forced to desex to win respect. Burt the Drag King – his vision of a gay Jesus sheathing the 5,000 notwithstanding – lacked the focused, festering awfulness of the men’s rights pair.

But a little bumpiness is perhaps inevitable in a show that feels so richly topical, so multi-directional and so alive – and which in any case was more than rescued towards the end by a pair of depraved grannies who enlisted audience members to enact scenes showing ‘the meaning of true love’, as found on Google (one involved a horse).

There aren’t many places you can go after that, which is exactly how you sense this duo like it. They bring their boundary-obliterating ride to a close with a chorus of ‘the patriarchy is dead … cunt, freedom, liberty’, sung from hymn (‘or her’) sheets placed beneath our seats. “That was fucking banging,” I heard somebody say. You can’t help feeling Big Clit would agree.

Queen C**t: Sacred or Profane? Cube, Bristol, Sat, March 3.

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