If you’ve come expecting a confessional show about gender transition, Sarah Franken tells us, you’re in the wrong place. Sarah was once Will, and cultivated a niche reputation for dark, dreamlike satirical comedy.
Franken stays in that territory with her first show post-transitioning, give or take a couple of anecdotes illustrating her new public life as a trans woman.
As with Franken’s earlier work, this is a smart, scabrous set – if not a jolly experience. She doesn’t do convivial: her comedy can feel as if it’s being performed in her bedroom, or her head, delivered in spite of rather than to its audience. In this solo but luridly populated sketch show, the sketches don’t begin and end, but bleed in and out of one another, sometimes so quickly you’re not quite sure what you saw.
Examples include an Isis training-camp skit, a scene in which various fawning experts decode Princess Charlotte’s squeaks, and another where the product of a failed abortion takes belated revenge on its mum. Franken prizes near-the-knuckle humour (the show is dedicated to the slain Charlie Hebdo cartoonists), even if the comedy – in a sketch about a regular-Joe dad demanding “mommy” wear the veil, say – is now and then eclipsed by moral rage.
One of the funniest skits is the mildest, as Franken beautifully parodies the corporate inanities of a workshop in interview technique. Even better is when her experience of gender transition feeds into a wider vision of a west lacking backbone, and confidence. In Franken’s hands, our collective confusion over which pronoun to use (one character is in the process of transitioning into five different people) becomes a weak spot rendering us vulnerable to Isis. It’s an intermittently persuasive vision of a culture in meltdown, and an intense hit of the babble of voices in Franken’s head.
• At Museum of Comedy, London, until 28 November. Box office: 020-7534 1744
