Aged 32, Helen Bauer has never had a boyfriend and her “empath” friends think they know why. Men like to be saviours, they tell her; you’ve got to be more vulnerable. But vulnerability, as her audience can tell, isn’t Bauer’s thing. She is an ego bursting off the stage; a cartoon of an overgrown kid roaring, laughing, and sending herself and everyone else up while in gleeful flight (we must assume) from the traumas she refuses to discuss with her therapist – because apparently 50 minutes is just not long enough.
You may consider such lack of vulnerability detrimental to Bauer’s comedy: the emotional palette of her loud and proud show, Grand Supreme Darling Princess, tends towards the garish. But the picture she paints with it is a compelling one; of a “basic” woman-child with “big dictator energy” whose relationship with her mum is arrested in adolescence while she obsesses over historical tyrants and vlogs about Disney World. All this is communicated with striking intensity, as she gets giddy to discover fellow Disney fans in the crowd and feigns arousal at a Stalin podcast. Every feeling is played as if it’s the most ardent she’s ever had.
The effect is uproarious, even if now and then I felt I was getting big personality at the expense of jokes. With the Disney material, that only takes you so far. Bauer’s routine on the sexual politics of Sleeping Beauty feels a bit shopworn. But with the anecdotes she excavates from her real life, the show comes alive – such as her babysitting tales, winningly high-spirited in Bauer’s telling and illustrative of her counterintuitive point about the supposed vulnerability of teenage girls.
A closing story about a misadventure in an Australian hotel situates Bauer squarely in her comfort zone, as the attention-hogging misfit parading her indignities for our delight – while also tying a ribbon around the damsel-in-distress theme. It’s a deft ending (or would be, if she didn’t flunk it with an unnecessary final routine) to a show that celebrates self-sufficiency, albeit of a very rackety variety.
• At Soho theatre, London, until 30 September
