Tea Wade’s MANDRILL is an hour where we find ourselves learning as well as laughing as we’re taken on a journey through time that becomes a compilation on how social norms that we’re familiar with today came to be. The combination of history and comedy, as well as rhyme makes this an extremely stylistically curious hour.
There is nothing out there quite like Tea Wade’s Mandrill
What’s impressive is how Wade does this entire show in rhyme. The rhyming scheme is quite simplistic, but they speak at a rhythm that is incredibly quick, especially for hour wordy it is. Much of the performance relies on them communicating their information at a quick tempo. Occasionally this comes at a cost of enunciation and volume, but it is an impressive feat, especially considering that they literally do not appear to pause for breath at all.
They define what they mean, and follow through setting oru expectations and flagging what we can expect for the next hour and take us through 2000 years of how the West shaped the concept of gender, breaking it down into key components and then taking us through it step by step, so not only are we privy to a highly entertaining hour of a combination of spoken word poetry and comedy, completely in rhyme but we also learn something. It’s like Dr Seuss but for the history of gender. The jokes are just wrapped into and in-between the historical journey that we’re taken on, but Wade communicates so much through tone and deft wordplay that we find ourselves laughing throughout.
From a historical perspective it’s just quite an interesting show how much different people and seemingly random events contributed to our overall understanding of gender today, especially since we’re most likely not using to see these otherwise isolated incidents and decisions in the past presented together like this. Wade distills a lot of complicated concepts into bite-size chunks and then communicates it all through rhyme, finding that point where we’re able to understand their point of argument without having lost any of the information that is needed for context, which is an incredibly important skill to be able to have.
The Fringe is a vast festival with so much going on, but it's safe to say there is nothing out there quite like Tea Wade’s MANDRILL.
