In the future, maybe everyone’s youthful indiscretions will be draped across the internet in perpetuity, and more standup shows created to do penance for them. That’s the impetus behind Anglo-Danish comic Sofie Hagen’s debut, which pre-empts anyone discovering her embarrassing teen Westlife fan-fic online by performing it herself, live on stage. Bubblewrap might have been a hit had it featured those sequences alone, but what really marks out Hagen’s set – this year’s Edinburgh fringe best newcomer award-winner – is how the boyband obsession is absorbed into a wider story about mental health and the arbitrary rules by which society compels us to live.
The show is also beautifully constructed. Its loops backward and forwards in time – and its unshowy but effective callbacks – are deftly engineered for maximum narrative effect. We first encounter Hagen squatting in a shower, engaged in unorthodox sex – which grabs the attention, while setting up the competitiveness (she’s doing it for a bet) that once established her as “a mini-celebrity on the Danish Westlife fan circuit”. Flashback to the days when she called Dublin phone numbers randomly in pursuit of her heroes, car-chased them across Scandinavia – and penned hundreds of teen fantasies with Westlife in starring roles.
Recited on stage, those stories engender big, if obvious laughs at the moral certainty and sexual naivety of 13-year-olds. But, set alongside Hagen’s tales of her adult sex life, and of a teenage visit to a psychiatric hospital after a period self-harming, the Westlife material feeds into a compelling picture of a girl working out how to be happy in a world that tells “chubby not fat” people they don’t deserve to feel that good. Smiley, but with a suspicion of steel, faux-arrogant – she feigns confusion that we don’t share her Westlife fetish – Hagen is a lovable guide through a tale that digs deep, but with a very light touch.
• At Soho theatre, London, until 6 January. Box office: 020-7478 0100.
