Lucy McCormick’s half-naked body is covered in tomato puree. The floor is littered with confetti and broken glass. Everything is slathered in hummus.
The disruptive artist’s new show at the Yard theatre in London is an intensely haphazard cabaret evening, in which she performs every act. With the pandemic, the scarcity of Arts Council funding and the unignorable pull to grow up and out of the arts, her co-performers have dropped out, she tells us. So she’s going solo. Since we’re here already, we may as well help her out.
Featuring grotesque, muck-strewn chaos bookended by dad jokes and audience participation, this solo variety show is infused with a childish sense of play. In spite of an intimate moment with a carrot that made an audience member behind me mutter, “Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ!” at increasing volume, this is one of the queer club performer’s more innocent shows. Fans will have seen her every orifice prodded in the extraordinary Triple Treat, and been shoved out of the way as she climbed over our seats as Boudicca in her historical re-enactment, Post Popular. Tonight’s stakes are lower, with McCormick running around dressed as a ghost, singing Adele.
Her aesthetic is decadent DIY – the spotlight is a torch held by someone in the second row – but her presence is high-class intimidating. Cajoled by her infectious, chaotic energy, we join in to sing from her song sheet (where one song’s lyrics are simply “ohohohoh” on repeat) and cheer loudly as she nearly sets fire to her hair with the sparks from a power tool. But when she tries to chat to us in between acts, we get a bit nervous. “Is it the imminent threat of participation?” she asks, wide-eyed and puree-laden, having moments before wielded a weapon at an audience member and had a brief wank with a toothbrush.
McCormick’s persona is brazen and assured. Often boisterous, a diva demanding to be adored, she can deal with any response from her audience; I once saw her sharply tell off a man at one of her shows for getting too cocky. But this confidence is always laced with a sense of faux vulnerability, as if she’s suddenly stripped off all her layers of performance and just wants you to reassure her that she’s doing OK.
When I interviewed her a few years ago, she said her shows are a way to test out a braver version of herself, as well as to explore what she finds hard. In her solo cabaret, she talks about the difficulty of making friends, and you notice that within each outrageous performance – a ghost, a cat, a sexpert – there’s a little callback to loneliness. Her work is such a striking style of personal parody, you never quite know when to stop laughing. But suddenly, up a ladder, wildly mucky and pantless, she is boldly, nakedly honest, and the uncertainty of how we’re supposed to respond is exhilarating.
McCormick is a master of this uncomfortable uncertainty. As soon as you’re on the back foot, she’s ready to immediately blast out another song to sing together, or to slather on a new bit of food from the fridge. The way she plays with power and authenticity is part of what makes her shows so addictive.
Where Triple Threat and Post Popular were slick in their wildness, her more recent ego-exploratory Life: Live! tipped over into unshaped chaos. This cabaret sits separately, upending expectations just as much as it embraces cliche. At the end of it all, she just wants us to feel a sense of togetherness. The colourful wreckage and the sexy absurdity are the ways she knows best to achieve it. Lucy and Friends may not have the overarching narrative that made her earlier shows spectacular, but her performances are always a pleasure. All the more so for being highly unpredictable, slightly intimidating, and extraordinarily messy.
Lucy and Friends is at the Yard, London, until 17 December.
