Felicity Ward: What If There Is No Toilet?
The Pleasance, until Aug 31 (not 17)
*** (Three stars)
If in your head the combination of anxiety attacks and irritable bowel syndrome makes you fearful of having an “accident” on stage, then why not bring it out into the open and create a show based on the fact that the combination of anxiety attacks and irritable bowel syndrome makes you fearful of having an “accident” on stage? Flanked by two pyramids of soft-roll tissues and with a porcelain lavatory seat behind her, Australia’s Felicity Ward takes us through her life, her mental illness and her therapy. It’s not toilet humour although there is humour in her obsession with toilets, and she uses the skills of a real comedy pro to draw the audience onside despite (or perhaps because of) the peaks and troughs of her personality. There is, of course, a genuinely serious place lurking behind the laughs, and she’s not afraid to take us there – even if the bleakest bits are lightened by wearing some of said toilet tissue on her face as a makeshift moustache.
Alan Morrison
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