Imagine Dame Edna Everage crossed with Leigh Bowery, throw in a dash of Marge from The Simpsons, and then consider this outlandish creature robbing a post office with a stocking over its head. That should give you some sense of the surprise that comes with the first glimpses of the Greek performer Euripides Laskaridis in this spectacle of the ridiculous.
As he walks across the floor in high heels, the sound becomes deafening. But it is the body that is most overblown here. Wearing a partially inflated fat suit, Laskaridis’s accident-prone creation, boasting monstrous protuberances, initially looks like a parody of femininity but reveals something more gender fluid. This fantastical character is placed in the most banal and drab of settings. An undecorated Christmas tree, long past its best, wilts sorrowfully in the middle of the stage.
What follows in Laskaridis’s solo show is, like so much in this year’s London international mime festival, odd but never uninteresting. A marble bust doubles as a toilet, a Swiss ball receives an enthusiastic spanking, an unintelligible speech is delivered with passion and there is 1950s-style crooning and some dancing.
It’s a show that borrows from the gaudiness of burlesque but morphs into something sadder and more tarnished. At the end Laskaridis peels away the mask to reveal the human beneath the outlandish costume, and it’s unexpectedly affecting.
- At the Barbican, London, until 4 February. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
