Legends do it their way. I have seen legends totter across stages, forget their lines, prove themselves incapable of holding a tune. I have seen legends fall down and get up again and fall again. Legend incorporates the word end, but legends never stop. They just go on and on and on, long after anyone can remember what the legend was legendary for. In the end we start applauding them not for what they do, but because they are still there; their survival affirms our survival. We take comfort from legends just as we do from the Archers.
So it is with Penny Arcade, the New York performance artist who hung around with Andy Warhol and who produced a solo show whose title alone, Bitch! Dyke! Fag-hag! Whore! would be enough to confer cult status. Sometimes I think that we expect too much from the theatre, but I do think that we are entitled to expect something, and Penny Arcade delivers very little at all. If this was an open mike session she would be booed off stage. Because she is a legend, she gets away from it.
If you had not yet come down from the 1960s, or had failed to catch a single woman performer on the comedy circuit over the past 20 years, you might find her interesting. But her material is no more cutting edge than anything that you can hear on Radio 4 at 6.30pm, and her emphasis on "me, me, me," the name dropping, the little girl persona and her emotional neediness with the audience are sad to watch.
To be fair, whoever came up with the idea of plonking her in the cavernous QEH needs a brain transplant. You sense that in an intimate cafe-style venue Arcade's warmth could well be winning. Here she is lost, and knows it, constantly referring to the running order and admitting that she wrote some of the show two days ago due to gall bladder surgery. Sorry, she should have just cancelled.
She gets a slightly better grip in the second half, with some pokes at identity politics, Allen Ginsberg and the Vagina Monologues. But even here there is uncertainty as she tells us of a recurring nightmare where she turns up to do a gig to find she hasn't written a show. It is not a nightmare: we are all sitting through it.
