
La Gayola, Spiegel Garden
The character at the centre of this show is Ida Barr, an ageing pensioner from Hackney who has taken up rap music and culture in her twilight years, making her a madcap hybrid of Hinge and Bracket and Eminem. She is performed with barely disguised glee by the wonderful Christopher Green, integrating rap songs, bingo, edgy ad libs and tongue-in-cheek reflections on life as an OAP in multicultural London.
This is classic drag performance that creates highly effective observational humour from the clash of two mutually exclusive cultures. Green uses a couple of bingo games to shape the hour’s entertainment, interlaced with off-the-cuff wit and amusingly sketching in some of the characters who share her sheltered accommodation along the way.
Green is adept at working his audience and the show is more interactive at most, ending in a sing and dance along. It’s a fast and furious as it can get with a hip replacement and haemorrhoids but Ida obviously has her finger on the pulse, even as her songs hilariously cover the shortcomings of the NHS and the peregrinations of her pet pooch rather than the urban sex and violence of conventional rap music.
La Gayola, Spiegel Garden, August 22-28
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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