Clown princess Natalie Palamides first came to Fringe attention with ‘Laid’, in which she memorably committed to the bit of playing a woman who laid an egg every day, followed by 2018’s landmark ‘Nate’. A hysterically funny but weirdly poignant hour, in it the (topless but with chest hair drawn on) Palamides played the eponymous mess of a man, a pitiable dumpster fire of confused sexuality and toxic masculinity with audience interactions to die for. Picked up by Netflix for a special, it turned her into a hipster global name.
Now finally here comes ‘Weer’. A natural evolution from ‘Nate’, its core concept is that Palamides plays both halves of a fractious young couple – Mark and Christina – at the same time, with her outfits and wigs divided asymmetrically down the middle (Mark on the right, Christina on the left) and her flipping from side to side depending on who’s speaking. Add to that, it’s a parody of ‘90s rom coms: it’s set in 1996 and 1999 and the pair are a Gen X couple who meet cute in the most ’90s way possible (I think also Palamides simply wanted to have the opportunity to have Mark repeatedly say ‘it’s Y2Kaaaaay’ in a stoner voice).
It is another virtuoso piece of batshittery from Palamides: on a technical level some of the stuff she’s doing is truly remarkable, especially when she’s mostly playing one character but being the arm of the other. It’s like that thing where you pretend to make out with yourself, but elevated to Da Vinci like art. It is also goofy as hell, funny because it’s a totally ridiculous spectacle, with some delicious audience interactions and a high quotient of mad stuff (the finale is gloriously insane).
The odd title is both a reference to the story’s duality – there are several bits where the duo inarticulately say the word ‘we’re’ repeatedly – and also Mark’s family inability to pronounce the word ‘deer’ correctly. It’s both a very silly reference and a somewhat serious one, which feels about right: Palamides is not even slightly sentimental, but she is great at injecting a note of raw, messy humanity to all her dicking around. ‘Weer’ is preposterous, but at its heart it’s about two people who can’t say what they feel about each other, a frustration that often curdles into toxic behaviour (but also there’s an amusingly daft reason why Mark can’t tell Christina he loves her).
It’s a bit fiddlier than Palamides’s previous outings: not only is it based around one performer playing two characters but it exists in a much more fleshed out world than its predecessors. There was a crisp singularity of form and purpose to ‘Nate’ and ‘Laid’ that is sometimes lacking here. But responding to success by making something bigger and more ambitious is hardly a cop out: this is the first Palamides show since she became a bona fide comedy star and she aces it, the kamikaze physicality of her earlier work taken to cinematic new heights.