![]() ![]() I reviewed the drag queen's show in Newcastle and didn't like it. ![]() Kate Wyver: an unhappy customerĪs someone who dishes out criticism regularly, I should be able to take it, too – but I was a bit taken aback when I learnt that Trixie Mattel had called me an ugly c**t in her book. What’s most embarrassing about this anecdote is not that I went to the wrong carpark, as you may have twigged, but that I spent such a long, long time scouring this desolate urban hellhole genuinely believing I might find a troupe of Bristolian dancers behind the next pillar. I made my way through every single floor of that car park, on foot, in the ever-growing darkness, searching for site-specific immersive dance. I made my way to the top of the car park. I arrived super early, totally ready to experience contemporary dance and brutalist concrete. It was one of those site-specific, immersive shows performed in an unusual setting: in this case, a multistorey carpark in Bristol. An unlucky configuration of over-running festival shows and illness meant I’d already failed to review the piece twice, so by the time I attempted to see it a third time I was committed. Such was the case with Dan Canham’s much-hyped Of Riders and Running Horses. ![]() There are some shows a person is just not destined to see. I heard a schoolteacher gasp and some children laugh. For a brief, agonising moment I presented a full moon to rows C through N. All that squirming had had an unfortunate knock-on effect, though, and left my trousers further down my backside than is entirely appropriate.Īs I half-stood to move along the row inconspicuously, my trousers caught on the arms of the seat and stayed where they were. I pulled myself up from the seat to follow. My friend grabbed her bag and shuffled across. Should we move to those free seats in the middle? The lights went down and the curtain up. The seats are hard and narrow, and not designed for bottoms beyond modest girth, so I was pretty well wedged in, and spent the minutes before the lights went down squirming to find an angle that wouldn't leave me with permanently bruised hips. St Martin's Theatre is not very comfortable at all. It was a weekday matinee so the theatre was barely a third full: a few pensioners, some bright-eyed tourists and a couple of school groups. The tickets were cheap, last-minute, end-of-row ones towards the front of the stalls. One afternoon in 2019, my friend and I decided we would finally see The Mousetrap. The show disintegrated, with the final thirty minutes consisting of Swinton, two strangers and myself dancing and singing karaoke to an auditorium that was entirely empty, save for the woman doing sound at the back. The three of us that remained struggled on for another ten, before deciding unanimously to join Swinton on stage together for the next song. Swinton reached the first song and asked us if anyone wanted to join him in singing it. The four of us filed into the 100-seat room, and the show started. I began to twig things were not going to go to plan when I arrived and there were only three others in the queue, all blokes. You only get one free ticket during the Fringe, so my plan was to go along, lurk at the back and not get involved. The concept was simple: host Scott Swinton tells the story of his life in showbiz, stopping every few minutes to crowbar in well-known songs, which he invites audience members on stage to sing. It was one of those late-night party shows that start at 11pm. It was the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe, and I had been asked by Fest Magazine to review a show called Karaoke Saved My Life. Here, after one anecdote from me, is what they sent. I thought it would be fun for this issue of The Crush Bar to ask some of my friends and fellow critics for their stories, too. These are the stories I tell people when they ask me what my job is like. Sometimes, a show has simply gone wrong: at the 2019 press night of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off at the Lyric Hammersmith, the stage lights failed in what anyone familiar with the play will realise is a brilliantly metatheatrical hiccup. Sometimes, something intentionally awful has happened to me during a show: I was hauled up before the audience and subjected to various humiliating punishments by comedian Adam Riches in his show The Beakington Town Hall Murders. Sometimes, I have simply been asked to review a weird show: I vividly remember being trapped in a rapidly reversing dodgem and chased by creepy, murderous clowns alongside the critic Alice Saville in Dutch performance artist Dries Verhoeven's experience Phobiarama.
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