Birmingham’s Fierce festival opened this week with a compelling call by director Aaron Wright for the UK to diversify its theatre ecology. Until that happens, Fierce continues to offer a fantastic array of international, radical and queer performance work – this year including Rosana Cade and Ivor MacAskill’s wonderful The Making of Pinocchio.
Premiering at Fierce 2022, Oozing Gloop’s Tentacular Spectacular is yet to hit those heights. An immersive late-night cabaret hosted by “autistic green drag queen” Gloop, it promises a vision of a new anthropomorphic/amphibian age on which its various acts don’t quite deliver.
There’s a tension apparent straight away between estranged and prosaic. We enter through an inflatable tunnel, into a music venue fitted up by designer Jenkin van Zyl to suggest the “multi-sensory, psychosexual swamp” of Oozing Gloop’s imaginings. But our first encounter is with Gloop and sidekick Olympia Bukkakis, gossiping about trans frogs, “goblincore” and the possibilities of transgender drag. The pair’s improvised back-and-forth – sparky if not always coherent – then alternates with a series of live art happenings, from Bonnie Bakeneko’s arresting childbirth act, all bloodied and bejewelled body-horror, to guest artist CHINA gyrating in feline furs to Billie Eilish.
Between performances, Gloop and Bukkakis marshal us around the warehouse space. The latter is the show’s most charismatic presence, even if her lecture challenging the Gaia hypothesis rather undermines the mushroom-hugging vibe. Gloop takes centre-stage only in the final moments, with a sermon on storytelling that delights in its own verbosity, while barely connecting with what’s gone before.
It can all be easily enjoyed, as a splash in the pondwaters of Oozing Gloop’s philosophy, where the boundaries between binaries, and species, blur. But that worldview is only sketchily brought to life here, and the show’s final act, “drag ogre” Shrek666, overstays their welcome. This horned beast in a latex bodysuit makes a vivid first impression, but the returns diminish, as it writhes its way out of its second skin then reflects the stage-lighting back at the audience – for a long time – with a fern-shaped mirror. Still early in its life cycle, Tentacular Spectacular is a tadpole that’s yet to become a frog.
Until 14 October. Fierce festival continues until 16 October.
