Hen and Chicken, Bristol (and touring)
"Maybe I'll try spoken word when I run out of chords"
No-one was ever in any doubt about Grace Petrie's verbal dexterity; her engaging stage presence; her capacity to storify life-experience or her political engagement. A lot of us must have come out of her folk/protest concerts thinking "I'd have been happy to just listen to the spiels between the songs for an hour and a half."
But this evening is a lot more than that. There's a story to tell and a message to send, and she does it with all the forceful wit you'd expect from her songs -- painfully vulnerable and honest, screamingly angry and killingly funny. What I wouldn't necessarily have predicted was that she would choose to tell her story in the form of a fairly traditional stand-up comedy routine.
She acts as her own support: she says that both the alternatives, someone who is much funnier her than her, or someone who is much less funny, were equally unattractive. But it's also a canny move to chat to the audience before embarking on the show-proper. It's slightly self-conscious: we are watching someone who is completely comfortable on the stage, but who has recently learned the classic stand-up tropes and is still trying them out. She says that she can't really do the "what do you do for a living?" audience banter, because people at her shows tend to have jobs like "working with parents whose children have been taken into care." But she gets good mileage out of an imagined rivalry between Bristol and Bath. She sensibly does a couple of songs but equally sensibly none of her hits; and specifically asks the audience to not heckle or over-react to her material. She warns that there will be a lot of f-words and "one perfectly deployed cunt". Someone in Edinburgh shouted out a punchline that was better than hers.
The main performance is an intense, deep and highly immersive ninety minutes about her life and sexual identity: how she came to understand herself as a gay, masculine-presenting woman as a teenager, and how she has had to watch that identity weaponised by extreme right-wing transphobes over the last two or three years. She jokes about not being as young as she once was (she's 35) but some of the cultural reference points are a little obscure to us elderly members of the audience. Third-wave Disney is a big thing: she knew she was gay because she would rather have married Princess Jasmin than Aladdin, and one of her songs riffs on Frozen. Some of the gags went over my head completely.
The crowd-pleasing one-liners may veer towards the obvious ("No-one here will have heard of J.K Rowling....Because she's been CANCELLED") -- although a room full of people booing Rowling is a very beautiful thing. But the show is at it's best with the absurd, drawn-from-life-anecdotes about innocent and less innocent misgendering. People have lately started to call her "they" even though she is quite clear that she is a "she". The sweary sections in which she entirely eviscerates Rowling and Mumsnet are very powerful; but they generally have belly-laugh pay-offs. She makes very clever use of comedic foreshadowing and callback, so a one-liner about a daft astrology tome early in the routine comes back as a show-stopping rallying call towards the end.
Even when she is at her most angry and polemical it never feels as if we are being lectured or preached to. As an older cis-male who mostly dresses according to gender norms, I came out with a clear emotional understanding of what Grace means by "butch lesbian". And why she thinks it matters.
I'm Andrew.
I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.
If you enjoy these reviews, please consider leaving a tip on the Ko-Fi platform.
If you can afford it, please consider becoming a Patreon, by pledging £1 or more each time I publish an essay on the main blog. (I don't charge for these little reviews.)
Please do not feed the troll.
No comments:
Post a Comment