★★★

“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.

AN ALPINE SYMPHONY

Royal Festival Hall

★★★★

“An Alpine Symphony is a sonic spectacular”

The London Philharmonic Orchestra were in fine form for this evening’s An Alpine Symphony.

The evening opened with the European premiere of Pasajes (Passages – 2022), composed by LPO Composer-in-Residence Tania León. The composer describes the 14-minute piece as “flashes in my memory”. A musical experience of León’s Cuban childhood memories and sounds including birdsong and the rhythm of the Carnaval. Instead of conga drums, here the kettle drums pick up the Latin American beat. The orchestra felt underused with the eight double-basses mostly plucking on one note.

Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor, Op.16 (1870) is the only concerto he completed, but it is still one of the freshest-sounding and heroically emotional piano concertos of the Romantic era. In a last-minute change of artist, tonight it was played by one of Britain’s most treasured musicians, the pianist Steven Osborne OBE, who replaced the remarkable 18-year-old Alexandra Dovgan who suddenly “had to withdraw from this concert due to visa difficulties”.

The Concerto is in three movements and opens with one of concert music’s most famous and dramatic openings, which is always breathtaking. The lyrical Adagio unfolds with just strings playing the ravishing main theme and unfolds with a deeply touching expressivity before plunging into the thrilling last movement with its beautiful flute solo (Juliette Bausor), lovely duet with piano and first cello (Kristina Blaumane) and its vigorous Norwegian folk tunes.

Osborne’s performance had him bouncing off his seat and with his staccato hands it was technically brilliant but, one felt that he missed the ambiguity of Grieg’s melodic contours, and in bringing out the emotions of yearning and melancholy as well as the joy and vitality – Grieg is never straightforward. At full throttle, the large orchestra slightly drowned out the piano, but you certainly felt all their emotion. In complete contrast to the Concerto, Osborne played a short encore with a gentle blues interpretation of Danny Boy.

After the interval the full London Philharmonic Orchestra, 120 stunning musicians under the baton of Principal Conductor Edward Gardner put their heart and soul into playing An Alpine Symphony, Op. 64 (1915) by Richard Strauss. The piece plays straight through, and you can literally visualise the journey up a snowy mountain from night to the sunrise, with the ascent up through the woods, past mountain pastures and waterfalls, wrong turns through thickets, going higher on to the glacier and up to the summit. Then comes the calm before the storm, then the thunder and tempest, to the descent as the sun is setting to night again. It is a massive play, and Strauss literally throws everything at this majestic piece. The French horn fanfares tonight came from an open doorway halfway to the back of the auditorium, then with a quick sprint backstage they joined the orchestra on stage. The whole orchestra is kept busy throughout; particularly the full timpani and percussion team who get to play everything from cowbells in the meadows to the incredible climactic storm atop of the mountain with wind machines, thunder sheets and symbols. The strings take up the rain and drip, drip, as the storm abates. Until then, the organ had been used more to prolong the notes of other instruments but came into its own strength towards the end as the descent begins before being joined by the deep and rich sounds of the brass section as the sun sets to night again.

I did not find the organ a comfortable instrument to listen to being played with a full orchestra. Sorry. It has such a different tone to the other instruments. But to have 120 of your band mates down below you on the stage and you hidden in between the crowded audience in the choir seats of the Royal Festival Hall, must truly be the loneliest gig in the world. Only able to see your fellow musicians and his conductor through his rear-view mirror, as his back is to them and the audience, facing a wall of organ pipes.

I loved the piece as a visual treat visualising twenty-four hours in the life of a mountain. However, it appears that Strauss might have had a different character for his symphony, drawing on the Neitzschean philosophy, writing in his diary in 1911 that he wanted “to call my Alpine Symphony, The Antichrist.” So maybe that is the answer as to why he put an organ in his symphony….

An Alpine Symphony is a sonic spectacular and the orchestra bowed to the front of the auditorium and turned and bowed low to the audience in the choir seats behind them – but I like to think they were bowing to their lonely fellow musician up top on the organ.

World class playing by the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

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

AN ALPINE SYMPHONY

Royal Festival Hall

★★★★