“funny and glamorous and poignant and delightfully rude”
Salmaan Mohammed aces it in their one hour, one person show ‘Cybil Service’ from deep in the bowels of Waterloo at the VAULT Festival.
Somewhat misleadingly billed on the festival site as ‘cabaret drag and burlesque’, this is in fact a smartly funny and poignant piece derived from the performer’s own experience working first as a drag artist then for government under lockdown.
Their drag alter ego makes a glamorous entrance at the start of the show. The stuff is strutted for sure but the fabulous outfit is soon shed – with some audience help – for wicked stories of Zoom meetings gone wrong and some sharp commentary on diversity driven governmental box ticking.
Who knew the Department of Transport was so keen to accommodate a self-identifying ‘weirdo and misfit’? And what happens when gay life is in the way of a new bus route? The writing is smart and the delivery fast and telling. Dominic Cummings even gets a memorable mention as a sentient turnip.
Sal Mohammed was funny and glamorous and poignant and delightfully rude in this sparkling tour de force of a show.
“Hastings’ performance is complicated and heart-rending”
As the audience files in, we’re initially greeted with a collage of screens playing wholesome random snippets- a merry-go-round, a dance troupe, pastries rising in the oven, a man juggling for the entertainment of a fluffy rodent- while ‘The Moon Belongs to Everyone’ plays on repeat. As soon as the lights dim, however, the screens switch to a news report about a bomb used in Vietnam. This is pretty much the order for the evening, splicing seemingly innocuous memories and feelings with deeply disturbing information. In a nutshell, “While I was at senior prom, I didn’t know my mom was being strangled.”
It’s hard to pin down a single narrative or message. Everything seems to be linked for writer and performer Rhys Hastings, but it’s impossible to unpick, or even understand everything being thrown at us. Hastings appears to be both trying to work through his trauma, as well as being completely immobilised by it; by telling his story he hopes that it heals something, but equally in remembering it all, he’s only reliving it.
According to the programme notes, this is supposed to be an exploration of ‘safe spaces’, but really it seems to be saying there’s no such thing, particularly in the world of creativity.
Hastings’ performance is complicated and heart-rending. It’s hard to know quite how autobiographical this story is, but either way, his character presents as confused and confusing: trying to be a good person, failing a lot, trying to work out what that even means.
Directed by Nastazja Domaradzka, Caceroleo is daring and brilliantly aggressive in its execution, placing the audience in the centre of a tornado with little to no explanation. It’s both hard to watch and hard to look away, and I leave the venue feeling confused myself, and not a little fragile.
