Natalie Palamides: Weer at the Traverse Theatre – Edinburgh Fringe Review

At the end of this symphony of silliness, Natalie Palamides stands, barely dressed, hair on end, on a stage that looks as if a bomb has hit it. Water, clothes, furniture, flowers, coffee cups and a plastic deer, split in two, all form part of the wreckage. In the midst of it all, Palamides smiles broadly. She has just pulled off an astonishingly achieved comic tour de force.

The Los Angeles comic is on a giddy rise to success. From a Best Newcomer award in 2017, her cross-dressing comedy Nate – A One Man Show found its way to Netflix. Weer continues the sense that she is both original and unstoppable. Her comedy is simultaneously endearing and unsettling, crossing boundaries that others might avoid.

This show is described as a romantic comedy, yet for all its whirling funniness, it feels more like a study of control and obsession than of true love. Its trick is that Palamides plays the two protagonists, Mark and Christina, in a doomed three-year relationship that reaches its ending on New Year’s Eve 1999.

With her body turned one way, she is moustached Mark, all plaid shirt and outraged expressions; turning the other way she is long-haired Christina, who has had enough of his flirting with other women and his inability to say he loves her. The sheer technical ingenuity involved in this dual performance is breathtaking. When they fight over a set of car keys, Palamides manages to suggest by vigorous jumping that the two halves of her body are different heights.

As the time frame reels back to the beginning of their relationship, Palamides charts each step from meeting on the street to dancing in the disco, sexual passion (turning one way and another in a double bed) to repeated break-ups. Audience members are roped in to play many parts, some reluctantly. Palamides’ irrepressible desire to find a suitably game man to play her ex-lover Robert leads to a wonderful improvised passage where a distraught Christina keeps arriving at the wrong house in the middle of the night.

There’s a wild confidence about everything she does. The show doesn’t seem to have much purpose beyond itself, it isn’t really offering a commentary on anything except Palamides’ ability to reduce an audience to helpless hysterics. But its comic book verve and its utter audacity make it incredibly freeing. It is outrageous good fun.