The sexism in Pot Noodle the Musical is charmingly synchronised with the brand's advertising
On arrival at this year's Edinburgh festival, I steeled myself for plenty of sexist comments and jokes about rape, paedophilia, Elisabeth Fritzl and Madeleine McCann. I wasn't disappointed. But what I wasn't prepared for was the level of sexism off the standup circuit, in fairly innocuous-sounding entertainment shows.
The most extreme case on the Fringe has to be the Jim Rose Circus, a horrifying offering of violent misogyny, as Lyn Gardner reported in her blog last week.
All around the Fringe, there seems to be an acceptance of low-level sexism as entertainment. It's typified by Cannibal! The Musical. Based on the film by South Park's Trey Parker, it is billed as "the most terrifying, gut-wrenching and hilarious musical since The Sound of Music". In reality it is a slack-paced mess featuring inexcusably shoddy production values, bad accents, racial stereotyping ... and appalling sexism.
The female actor with most stage time plays a horse, a sheep, and a Native American Indian, who just burbles in something that sounds like Korean. Her one line in an hour's performance was "baaa". I can't tell you her name, because it is not listed in the programme or online. Her main role as Lianne the horse involves shuffling around on all fours covered in some fluffy brown material, which coincidentally is short enough to leave her bottom exposed in flesh coloured tights. Cue lots of scenes of men riding the horse doggy-style. Much of Lianne's time is spent on a very unhorselike two legs snuggling into various men who are her owners. At the end of the play Lianne is sold for $8 to a hulking African-American playing a Native American Indian gangster chief. I found the racial stereotyping of the black man as pimp equally uncomfortable, but would they have been able to get away with a black man shuffling round the stage on all fours being degraded and dehumanised as a mute animal? I don't think so.
Shaking with rage after having sat through all this (I would have walked out along with about 30 others if I hadn't been reviewing) I went to the toilet and overheard the following reactions. "I thought it was really funny, yeah," said one teenager. A woman in her 50s simply berated herself for not being amused: "Everyone else was laughing. There must be something wrong with me." Are we so repressed that we laugh at our own degradation?
In Pot Noodle the Musical, a fairly slick if unoriginally formatted show, the main character Sandy Little dresses up as a cat in order to go into hiding. Except that with "the face of a feline, and the body of a woman" one imagines she would be fairly obtrusive. Sandy-Puss forgets she is in hiding and introduces herself to two avowed batchelors. Cue lots of bestiality and pussy jokes, all chiming rather well with the inherent sexism of the Pot Noodle brand and advertising campaigns.
With more than 2,000 performances on offer at Edinburgh, I was hoping to find a balance of shows challenging sexism, racism and homophobia in a witty satirical way. Other than The Riot Showgrrls Club, a hilarious mix of cabaret songs and anti-porn campaigning, I didn't find any. Am I the only one disturbed by how ready we are to accept this kind of anachronistic sexism in our entertainment?
