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Vulvarine: A New Musical, Assembly George Square Studios, review

August 21, 2018

Its protagonist may be ‘astoundingly average’, but Fat Rascal’s latest hour of unadulterated silliness – Vulvarine: A New Musical – is anything but. Impeccably slick and overflowing with imagination, this original feminist musical is a tour de force in its own (deceptively intelligent and sublimely riotous) right.

Fat Rascal Theatre transport audiences to High Wycombe with ample wry enthusiasm in Vulvarine: A New Musical, introducing us to plain-Jane-protagonist Bryony Buckle – whose luck is down. Her ‘Tinder for booking swapping’ entrepreneurial brainwave didn’t work out, and she’s trapped in a mundane tax office job – with only fantasising about Orson from IT to get her through it.

What follows is an hour overflowing with imagination and some of the wittiest one-liners I’ve heard all Fringe. Contemporary and acerbically self-aware devised musicals may not be groundbreaking (particularly in the context of Fringe) – but the wit and precision behind Vulvarine makes it superior, in my mind at least, to last year’s The Stage award-winning Prom Kween. Fat Rascal’s pace is relentless and unapologetic – it’s like the whole thing has both been devised, and is being performed, on crack – but I mean that in the best possible way. Feminist observational comedy is interwoven with farcical mayhem, and the company are masters at playfully poking fun at – and undermining – every convention they establish. It’s riotous and quietly intelligent and knows exactly what it is – which makes it so easy to sit back and howl with laughter.

You wait for it to fall (as so many similar shows do) into a familiar rhythm, but this one doesn’t. As the piece progresses, the wit gets ever sharper – and the characters get ever more shamelessly obscene. All of Vulvarine: A New Musical‘s human characters have a quality similar to the puppets in Avenue Q – fabulously offbeat and often little more than an (often questionable, entirely deliberately I expect) accent and a strange hat. Lines like ‘imagine calling your son Pat when he’s a postman’ seem (in its context at least) almost too good to have been written – and akin to Dolly Parton’s iconic ‘It costs a look to look this cheap’ mantra, ‘it requires a hell of a lot of precision to look this chaotic’ could easily be Fat Rascal’s. Of course, what really makes it a joy to behold is you have complete confidence – beneath the what-seems-like-pandemonium – that the piece is impeccably rehearsed and impossibly slick.

Robyn Grant steals the show as a multitude of sublimely outlandish characters (including the villain), each camper and more beguiling than the last. It likely won’t get the attention it deserves due to the light-hearted content of the piece, but Grant’s performance is exceptional (award-worthy, I’d suggest); it’s near-on impossible to take your eyes off her whenever she’s even clicking along in the background, and every character she (seemingly effortlessly) introduces seems entirely worthy of their own spin-off.

Allie Munro’s Bryony is magnificently warm and self-aware, Jamie Mawson demonstrates astute comic timing (despite the fact the women are given ALL of the best punchlines…in itself excellent) as Orson – and all are more vocally competent than you’d perhaps expect for a show of this nature. It’s perhaps a shame the ‘most stupid’ characters seem to be those with the working-class accents, and that the final song comes across as a little underwhelming (probably due to lacking a punchline of its own), but they’re tiny niggles in what really is an unadulterated hour of deceptively intelligent and carefully constructed silliness.

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Edinburgh  / Edinburgh Cabaret  / Edinburgh Musicals  / Featured

Arthur Jones
Arthur graduated from Warwick's Theatre and Performance course in 2014 with first-class honours, the Student Prize and a lot of opinions. Alongside two coursemates, he started an interactive theatre company and has been taking studio shows to Edinburgh's Underbelly, London's Camden People's Theatre and more for the last four years. He works on the production team for The Jamie Lloyd Company and ATG Productions, and also teaches drama and singing at LCN Performing Arts every weekend, an independent performing arts school in Lewisham (which is where he grew up).

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