TESTO

Purcell Room

★★★

“pushes the boundaries, defies expectations and refuses to conform”

Award winning drag artist, Wet Mess, closes the 2025 tour of their first full length solo show, ‘TESTO’, in London. Dismantling the boundaries of gender, transition, performance and more, this surrealist fever dream is as cocky as it is vulnerable. Self-described as “horny for your confusion”, the abstraction and pacing do lose me in places. However, the work remains provocative, inventive and daringly experimental – the kind of theatre we need more of.

Out of a green haze, the words ‘tell us about a dream’ glow red before taking us on an erotic journey involving butter that sets the tone for the evening. ‘TESTO’ explores transmasculinity in a dreamlike structure, weaving searching questions and real life interviews with movement and lip syncs. Themes surface in waves, some provocative, some reflective, others more ordinary. Only it’s not a dream.

Created by Wet Mess and produced by Metal & Water (Nancy May Roberts & Lucia Fortune Ely), ‘TESTO’ is anarchic and affecting. Beneath the swagger and spectacle lies a yearning to be seen, with all the contradictions and mixed emotions visibility entails. The closing sequence cycles the words ‘you are afraid but awake,’ anchoring the surreal in stark reality. Wet Mess also fulfils one interviewee’s wish to be mundane by fashioning a sofa from all that’s been discarded and cracking a beer. That said, it isn’t always layered, such as the giant gender sausages and defiant nude lip sync of Loreen’s ‘Euphoria’. Some of the more surreal sections elude me entirely – I’m looking at you butter bath. The pacing also falters: most sections linger a beat too long and a couple of passages seem to run out of development, creating gaps in momentum.

Wet Mess’ movement is an almost continuous thread, marked by strong shapes, intriguing lines and bursts of frenetic energy. However, it feels surprisingly restrained in places. The surreal butter dream, for instance, doesn’t lead into a dynamic grand entrance but some slightly anticlimactic swaggering. The sequence of jerking and humping risks becoming repetitive after a while. Though perhaps this is a deliberate subversion of expectations.

Wet Mess delivers an arresting performance, brimming with cockiness yet tempered by rawness and vulnerability. It is an assured, literally bare all display marked by precise lip syncs, strong movement and polished delivery. The lip syncing itself is cleverly varied, avoiding predictability, with controversial recordings sharpening the piece’s edge.

Ruta Irbīte’s set design is striking: a vulva like red curtain gives way to a phallic catwalk. Oversized sausages playfully suggest symbols of gender identity.

Baby’s evocative sound design weaves voices, vocalisations, synth and textured noise into a distinctive soundscape that shapes the atmosphere of each section and underscores the deeper messages.

Joshie Harriette’s lighting design conjures dreamlike illusions through deft combinations of smoke and light. Inventive spotlight positioning creates striking contrasts between light and shadow, while bursts of flashing intensify key moments.

Lambdog1066’s costume design is artful and layered, opening with a high fashion boxing cape – reclaiming a traditionally masculine symbol – and closing with a curtain repurposed as a robe – underscoring the interplay between spectacle and intimacy. Ultimately, the stripping away of all clothing functions as a powerful rejection of gender conformity.

‘TESTO’ pushes the boundaries, defies expectations and refuses to conform. But does it work as a cohesive show? I’m less sure. Still, that uncertainty doesn’t diminish its impact and the spectacle is worth witnessing, even if we never get to the bottom of the butter.

TESTO

Purcell Room

Reviewed on 28th November 2025

by Hannah Bothelton

Photography by Lesley Martin

TESTO

Baby

Drayton Arms Theatre

Reviewed – 25th October 2018

★★

“The characters are shallow, the plot non-existent, and the music counterintuitive”

“I’m pregnant” – so say the leading ladies of Baby in its first scene. And its third scene. And its final scene. Actually, the whole show is some variation of “I’m pregnant” or, in at least one case – spoiler alert – “I’m not pregnant”. Can a full-length musical dedicated to the idea of having a baby be boring? Hey, you said it, not me.

Baby was first produced on Broadway, in the 1980s, where it ran, modestly, for less than year. The show oozes an 80s aesthetic, as well as 80s cultural values, and there is a fair number of groans – landlines, moustaches, instances of casual misogyny. (How disappointing that, in the same month that Marianne Elliott took a 70s relic and made it fresh in Company, Baby director Mark Kelly somehow added ten years to his source material).

Baby doesn’t have much of a plot. Three couples learn they are pregnant; two of these pregnancies are unplanned. The couples are spuriously linked through one university where the men work or study, although this link is superfluous; the characters are united and reunited throughout the show by a series of awkward coincidences – bumping into each other on the street, that sort of thing.

The music in Baby is jaunty, except for the occasional wailer, and helps to carry the bizarre current of pep that zips through the score like Larry Bird on Diet Coke. The lyrics do tend to get a bit out there, taking intimate, personal moments, and throwing them into abstraction. Take, for example, the opening number, which I guess is about the process of conception:

Stop the moment, Take it in, Can’t you feel, The change begin?, Don’t you feel, The cosmic surge, As two lives begin to merge?

From my seat in row E there was no cosmic surge, but maybe you need to be closer to the stage.

Considering the drudge that is the source material, the cast do good work. Laurel Dougall as Pam Sakarian, a gym teacher who is desperate to get pregnant, is full of vim and tragedy, and really steals the show in act 2. Holli Paige Farr plays Lizzie Fields, a college student who gets knocked up by her boyfriend, cleverly and with dignity; she rises above the text.

The set design is minimal, but effective, and the costumes certainly bring home the 80s theme, although I can’t for the life of me figure out why the ensemble are so often dressed in baseball jerseys when they are not, in fact, playing baseball.

Baby was not a smash in 1983, and it has even less going for it now. The characters are shallow, the plot non-existent, and the music counterintuitive. Still, there are some good performances in this production at the Drayton Arms, and theatregoers should take note of the names Laurel Dougall and Holli Paige Farr, who, given better material, may one day really be able to send out those cosmic surges.

TESTO

Purcell Room

★★★

“pushes the boundaries, defies expectations and refuses to conform”

TESTO

Purcell Room

Reviewed on 28th November 2025

by Hannah Bothelton

Photography by Lesley Martin

Previously reviewed at Southbank Centre venues:

TESTO

TESTO

TESTO

Baby

Drayton Arms Theatre

Reviewed – 25th October 2018

★★

“The characters are shallow, the plot non-existent, and the music counterintuitive”

Stop the moment, Take it in, Can’t you feel, The change begin?, Don’t you feel, The cosmic surge, As two lives begin to merge?

From my seat in row E there was no cosmic surge, but maybe you need to be closer to the stage.

The set design is minimal, but effective, and the costumes certainly bring home the 80s theme, although I can’t for the life of me figure out why the ensemble are so often dressed in baseball jerseys when they are not, in fact, playing baseball.

Reviewed by Louis Train

Photography by Thomas Scurr

Baby

Drayton Arms Theatre until 9th November

Previously reviewed at this venue:

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