At the start of the show I heard some people remark that they had seen Beth Vyse last year and had come back. I can only say I will not be repeating their mistake.
This show was a confused, chaotic, thoroughly unentertaining mess. Vyse plays dying actress Betsy Lyn, as she relates her life and its various bizarre ups and downs. We meet ‘wacky’ characters from her life including a Rastafarian doctor, a set of blind Chinese twins from China’s Got Talent and a taxi driver who donates body part to celebrities. All are played by Vyse. None of them are funny. Most of them are offensive. A particular highlight was when one of the blind Chinese boys started singing, grabbed a reluctant audience member and proceeded to hump him while he tried desperately to flee.
There is a multimedia aspect to this show. Using images and video clips projected onto the screen Vyse attempts to further the narrative. Quotations from Shakespeare are occasionally displayed though they never seem to relate to what is on stage. Occasionally the projections are used so that Vyse can have character interaction in this one woman show. Using video clips and previously recorded dialogue, digital Vyse interacts with real life Vyse, all in character of course. Sometimes there is a man on a bus narrating, for no apparent reason.
I almost want to congratulate Vyse for putting herself out there to this extent. Then I remember that she cost me an hour of my life with this show. Though Vyse may be a talented and outrageous performer this show does nothing to show it.
Though listed as a comedy this show quite simply wasn’t funny. It wasn’t shocking or provoking. It was just cheap, with fake testicles hanging out of shorts and plastic vaginas thrown with wild abandon. There really isn’t much else to say about this show. The barely existent plot is terrible, the humour doesn’t work and it was horrible to sit through.
The worst thing about this show is that though there were undoubtedly some offensive parts, I didn’t leave offended. I simply left bored.
