Lorna Irvine sings 'Hosanna!' for Tranny and Roseanna's latest offering at The Arches.
Turns out Jesus was really a stomping, spitting, shaven-headed lesbian...Who knew?
No, it's not a new Kanye West concept album but rather a 'tongue in many cheeks' approach to the Nativity by Tranny and Roseannah, beloved Arches favourites. Rosanna Cade and Laurie Brown's good cop/bad cop alter-egos are back to bring merry-hell to the festive season, with more bad taste on display than Ron Burgundy in a hall of mirrors, and it's always structurally on the brink of collapse: that's part of its naughty charm.
For this is anti-panto, using a 'disused children's show set’, two Marys try to get to an inn, except (as recently seen in the news with the bigoted Christian couple who run a B&B) there's no room for a gay couple.
Elsewhere, we are treated to Tom Daley as honorary angel; an unspeakable act with a chicken, tap-dancing and lap-dancing, Gabriel in a silver unitard (Brown, of course) and a pervy Grandpa ('someone we picked off the street') hilariously played completely deadpan by Eilidh MacAskill, enticing people in with 'his' Werther's Originals. There's even a Tiny Tim figure on work experience (poor long-suffering Jessica Zita Bennett, who gets the brunt of Brown's acid tongue).
No one but no one in the audience is safe- Cade as a saucy Santa, who is a bizarre half Grinch/half Janice Dickinson hybrid, even twerks on the Arches' own Artistic Director Jackie Wylie to squirms and shrieks of delight and horror. Sitting at the back is no guarantee you will remain unmolested.
It's not all throwaway, though. There's a real poison to this satire- Cade's extensive tirades on phallocentric British culture are ferocious and feel timely. Ultimately, though, it's Cade's reclaiming of female nudity (as grotesque as it is funny) and Brown's glamour (amped-up, pouting, leggy) which flips the mainstream panto paradigm of men being funny, women as sexual: a real gender-bending exercise in subversion and neat antidote to buxom dames and girls in uniform. What could be better?
Just...
don't bring any Christians. Or kids.
At The Arches until December 21
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