Clap Back Club have done it again!
A bold and daring soirée
The feminist performance troupe, that started off as a choir, never fail to bring harsh truths to a laughing audience through parody and song. This award winning theatre company has a knack for pulling together tragedy and comedy and Furlough She Better Don’t is no exception.
Excellently compèred this time by the painfully funny Beth Hodd, who delivered wit also written by Hattie Snooks, the team deliver an array of rewritten musical classics (STEPS' Tragedy recontextualised onto the 2020 landscape anyone?) with comical dance moves to accompany.
With its red and black costume and cabaret show structure woven together by Director Producers Annie North and Alice Leverton, I am reminded of a Victorian music hall in miniature, intimately and safely set up at the performance space of the Caxton Arms. Production highlights included Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse lyrics swapped with 'totally f**ked from the start' and Chicago’s Cell Block Tango retold; revealing in a whole new and unsettling sense.
A disturbingly delightful collaborative production that is impossible not to laugh along with. All the cast, including Lexi Pickett, Maia Orme and Elle Dyson had strong and wonderful voices, but the beautiful camp scats of 'the token cisgender man', Rhys Christian, stood out. The audience was enthralled through every musical number, gleefully clapping along and collectively groaning at our pitiful government behaviour. Clap Back Club is a bold and daring soirée, where you leave with a cathartic bad taste in the mouth for the political movements and injustices of our time. Comedy and the bitter truth, is it REALLY possible to deliver both? Yes Brighton, it is. And it's nothing less than theatrical therapy.
