Hole! at Soho Theatre – review

Truly original, brazen, and, somehow, quite touching, Nadja Leonhard-Hooper and Jake Brasch bring Hole! all the way from New York for a short run in Soho before shocking and delighting crowds at the Edinburgh Fringe for a second year running.

One night, Pastor Garth awakes suddenly and recounts a prophetic dream, that the “Great Sucking” is coming, and the only way his congregation will avoid being sucked into the sky by their anuses is to wear a butt-plug 24-7. He immediately purchases 8,000 wooden butt-plugs from Amazon (free shipping!). While this is the last straw for his wife, his young son and 80 members of his congregation plug up their bums and sit tight.

It’s the scrappy upstart to The Book of Mormon’s slick West End production; a winning combination of nerdy musical theatre and boundary-pushing obscenities.

We’re lured into a false sense of goofy wholesomeness with rhymes like “Nebraska/Since you asked-a” and jokes like, “Take my hand”, “I can’t, I’m playing piano”, the audience chuckling good-naturedly. But an hour in, and we’re howling at “Sky f*cking in the sky”. A very different sentiment but just as earwormy as Mormon’s “Hasa Diga Eebowai”, and just as poorly received on the night bus home when I can’t seem to wring it from my brain.

At first glance, the staging looks like an early morning kids’ show from the ‘90s: two beaming hosts with hair sculpted into giant hoops stand behind a radial desk scattered with multiple keyboards and neon percussive instruments, never mind the butt plugs and one rogue vibrator littered among it all.

Leonhard-Hooper and Brasch are, of course, fantastically talented as both writers and performers. But best of all, they’re game. They’ll say and sing nearly anything to have the audience gasping and cackling. This is easier said than done when there are only two people on stage, playing multiple characters, and the biggest set piece is their hair, hardly helpful if they wanted to understandably hide for a second, having repeatedly play-acted popping a butt-plug in and out of their own anuses for the audience’s entertainment.

Imagine what this show would be with a proper West End set-up, an army of Cincinnati daddies in leather lederhosen, multiple bodies being whipped up into the sky, bum first, a full chorus singing “No matter what, we plugeth up the butt”.

But perhaps the joy of Hole! lies in its rustic charms, and how very tied it is to Leonhard-Hooper and Brasch’s particular conviction in spreading the word about the “Great Sucking.”