In one of the most defiantly unique shows at this year’s Fringe, Natalie Palamides takes the one-woman play to its absolute extreme; because Palamides plays out the entire show in 2D, one side of her body is dressed as an archetypal 90s baggy-jeaned, stoner-voiced, Pearl Jam-loving oaf, and the other as a pretty-in-pink, Y2K, material girl stereotype. She toggles from character to character, doing 180s throughout the show depending on which character happens to be speaking. Through skilful and inventive movements, she creates gut busting moments of physical comedy in the show’s frequent arguments – it takes the idea of seeing both sides of the argument very literally.
The premise is a parody of a nineties romcom, complete with a meet-cute, chance encounters, and tearful scenes of confession. It takes all of these tropes and subverts them to create a story of one of the worst relationships ever seen in fiction; they’re at each other’s throats from the start, and their moments of profound connection are peppered with absurdities. Palamides crafts a hilariously dysfunctional romance which oscillates from farcical to insane. The inventive and lewd sex scenes also help to exemplify this aspect of total chaos. It’s riotously funny and absolutely gripping.
The show also toys with its ending, providing you with multiple incongruous scenarios, eventually culminating in a farcical Shakespeare homage and melodramatic religious conclusion. It can be difficult to gauge what the subtextual message is in all of this; perhaps some greater sense of emotional profundity fell to the wayside in attempting to maintain the sense of chaos which permeates the production, but it would have been nice to have something more to chew on after leaving the theatre. That doesn’t take much away, however, from a scarcely believable technical feat and an hysterical performance which achieves so much with so little.
Natalie Palamides: WEER, 21:30, Traverse Theatre, until August 25
https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/natalie-palamides-weer
