A fun, camp, bawdy mess littered with enjoyable humour
Following on from last year’s critical and popular success of their show Diana: The Untold and Untrue Story Linus Karp and Joseph Martin return with another silly premise, turning the scandalous Gwyneth Paltrow ski trial into a musical comedy littered with humour you’d see in drag shows, and with about as much general silliness and bawdiness too. From songs, to audience participation, trials, puppetry and “live” video calls from the drag queen Trixie Mattel, a lot is thrown at you across the 80 minutes to mixed effect
Spanning almost a decade, encompassing Gwyneth’s rise to fame, initial meeting of a certain litigious Optometrist and subsequent court case. During this time there’s a lot thrown at you (and one time you get to throw stuff back at the actors) to varying degrees of success. Certain aspects like the songs produced by Leland used in the show, fall short of being really camp and fun, instead falling flat. At times it feels like they were unsure of where to go with the humour emotionally, and the lack of structure is a loss for the show. There’s plenty to laugh at but those laughs are not as well earned, or meaningful when you cant buy into the narrative.
It misses the mark too often in it’s satire. Their previous show benefited from ridiculing the royal family, a topic filled with enough scandal, jokes and absurdities on its own. However the ski trial while silly, and frivolous in itself, has so much less gravitas to contort into a side-splitting show. Linus, Joseph Martin, the stage hand and audience all make you laugh, sometimes even improvising the punchlines, but few of these jokes are as good, poignant or risky in the same way they’ve been in their prior shows.
This isn’t helped by the length, pacing at times feels too slow and full of fluff especially before the trial. The trial is easily the highlight of the show, here we can see the well worked characters taken to extremes through interrogating each other, as well as the facts and quotes from the real trial that make their way in seamlessly, spoofing the court room drama with ease. I feel like there is so much wasted potential by not focusing more on this aspect.
A fun, very camp mess, suffering from good ideas and concepts that don’t gel well together.