Reviews

Eat Your Heart Out

An incandescent mixture of analytical performance art and responsive comedy, Eat Your Heart Out have once again proven themselves as the First Family of alternative performance at the Fringe. Mother Scottee and his avant-garde brood of miscreant children of the cabaret revolution have created something timely and fluid.

Bounding onto the stage in a heavily-sequined, ruffled dress, host and creator Scottee rightly takes the evening’s spotlight. His talent as a master of ceremonies is matched only by his talent as a Live Art performer. His exceptional “You Can Leave Your Hat On” vignette proves that experimental theatre can be witty and accessible without alienating its audience, creating something frightening and wondrous in equal measure.

With hair piled as high as her heels, Myra DuBois is one of the most exciting faces in cabaret. Her sour expression, dark eyes and painted scowl are fitting complement to her caustic delivery, batting inspired cynicism with effortless spontaneity. “Auntie Myra’s Magic Show”, DuBois’s sharp and reactionary foray into children’s entertainment, is painfully funny, observant and full of the recognisable tragedies of youth and age.

And that is just half of the night. Despite some initial pacing problems, Nando Messias’s demonic tea-party piece is a scolding and wrathful attack on childhood perceptions of love and romance whilst wry chanteuse Miss Annabel Sings pierces the little silence of the night with an internalised, quietly impassioned spoken word piece.

When the cabaret rapture comes, Scottee and Myra DuBois will be scalping the toupees of light entertainers. Frantic and frenetic, Eat Your Heart Out explodes the fourth wall between us and them, seizing its audience by their smiling faces and rubbing them in its sweaty cleavage.

Eat Your Heart Out
is on at Assembly George Square, 17-28 August, 11:45 (1hr15mins)