Wowzer. Where to begin with Frankie Thompson’s extremely out-there debut Fringe show?
Describing it is… not easy, but I suppose it’s a clown show of sorts, or at least, I imagine that’s the justification for putting it in the comedy section of the Fringe brochure, though if it had been billed as a work of avant-garde theatre nobody would have batted an eye.
Shuffling on stage in NHS specs and full ‘80s workout gear – including a lime green headband and leg warmers – Thompson looks anxious and frankly somewhat repulsed by us. She mutters something faint about ‘working out how to cope’, then bungs on a VHS of an old Jane Fonda workout.
After a brief burst of Fonda’s buns of steel, the recording glitches into an old recording of Andrew Lloyd Webber's ‘Cats’. Suddenly Thompson brightens up. She starts lipsyncing along to it. The tape does not stay with ‘Cats’ but keeps circling back to it, with weirdly decontextualised interviews with Elaine Paige and director Hal Prince, and a truly bizarre road safety PSA that the original Broadway cast made. There is loads of other cat content in there, like Thompson furious jerking her body about to the theme from ‘Bagpuss’. There’s some non-cat stuff too, like splicing together recordings of One Direction and Beatles fans. Plus there’s lots of stuff that shouldn’t have anything to do with cats that has been catted up – a doctored version of Britney’s ‘Oops… I Did It Again’, for instance.
Thompson mouths away frantically to all of this, often breaking into fits of furious exercise on a treadmill at the centre of the room. It’s funny because it’s so weird; it’s funny because some of the old recordings are funny in themselves; it’s funny because Thompson is funny - there is a hysterical scene based around recordings of women talking about the idea of being a cat lady, abruptly interspersed with bits in which a snarling Thompson hurls cuddly toy cats at us while miming to the Cat Lady from ‘The Simpsons’.
Fluidly directed by Liv Ello – it’s total chaos, but it hangs together – ‘Catts’ can just be enjoyed as a random good time. But there’s clearly a lot more going on here.
As an aside, the show's fascination with analogue technology and dated cultural anachronisms is really alluring – Thompson must have been born years after video cassettes became redundant, but it feels like the show taps into some sort of collective nostalgia, and there’s a real crate-digging sensibility at play here.
The crux, though, is Thompson’s performance. She is funny, but she also seems agonisingly vulnerable. There are a couple of moments when the tape stops and she seems barely able to communicate with the audience. It’s clearly done to effect earlier on, but when she addresses us ‘properly’ at the end, she seems genuinely anxious. I’m slightly extrapolating stuff from the show’s official description now, as none of this is said out loud, but I believe that just as exercise is a common way to deal with anxiety, so Thompson’s whole mime-along performance style is a form of coping with some mental health issues she faces. She has presumably created this gloriously bizarre persona and performance style as an elaborate coping mechanism – and I really hope it’s working for her, because she’s clearly a major talent, and this show is like nothing else you’ll see at the Fringe.