If you want the tl;dr version of this review, it’s brilliant, I loved it and you should see it if you can.
TalkSmall are two East 15 Acting School physical theatre graduates, Bobbie Twaddle and Ellie Begley, and Katherine & Pierre is their first show. It’s a love story between two office workers, Katherine (Bobbie Twaddle) and Pierre (Ellie Begley). Each has a crush on the other, they go for a drink after work one night and wake up together the next morning.
Over the course of an hour, their relationship goes through first intense desire, splitting up, getting back together again, marriage, a child, unhappy middle age and reconciliation. It’s like a queer version of the married life sequence from Pixar’s film, Up. It is billed as "A Katy Perry Drag Musical", but the performers don’t actually sing or speak, the show is a mixture of mime, lip synching, Lecoq-style clowning, physical theatre and pop dance choreography, all performed with pin-sharp accuracy and coordination.
This is real start-up, no budget theatre. The set consists of two office chairs on wheels and, between them, Ellie and Bobbie wrote and directed the show, Ellie choreographed it, they designed it, they did the lighting and Bobbie compiled the soundtrack with Isla Clarke.
The soundtrack comprises a lot of Katy Perry songs interspersed with fragments of other pop culture references. Some are obvious; when Katherine and Pierre take a holiday in Las Vegas, they arrive to the sound of Elvis Presley’s “Viva Las Vegas” and depart to Katy Perry’s “Waking Up In Vegas”.
Other references are more obscure but they work perfectly and the lip synching is flawless. We get Katy Perry’s “when I meet my life partner, I won’t have to choose” monologue from the Part Of Me documentary, that Tesco checkout girl “I feel like killing myself” viral video rant, James Corden’s “chicken bhuna, lamb bhuna” speech from Gavin and Stacey and a long, and brilliantly executed, lip-synched version of Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson tearing pieces out of each other in the film Marriage Story.
The random pop culture references are the point. It works in the same way as 1980s hip-hop sampling: you take references your audience already knows, plus some they possibly don’t, and recontextualise them to create something new. In his 2014 TED Talk, Mark Ronson said of the early hip-hop record producers, "they weren’t sampling these records because they were too lazy to write their own music… they wanted to inject themselves into the narrative."
That’s what Katherine & Pierre does: it injects these young, queer artists into the narrative of the online video memes they have grown up with. If it were done badly, it wouldn’t work, but the soundscape is meticulously constructed, and it perfectly matches the eclectic, high energy performance it accompanies.
If it sounds trashy and silly and fun, a lot of it is, but the show has heart, too. The sequence in which Katherine and Pierre’s child learns to walk, goes off to school and turns into a noisy teenager is brilliant. It only lasts a few seconds, but it is flawless, both in concept and execution.
When the couple separate after their child has grown up, the show takes on a darker tone and there is real tenderness in the performances. When they are reunited, accompanied by Ross and Rachel from Friends finally declaring their love for each other at the airport (Ross: “Did she get off the plane?” Rachel: “I got off the plane.”) it is genuinely moving. Yes it’s cheesy, of course it is, but they recognise that pop culture is the soundtrack to people’s lives and it can express something real.
In Noël Coward’s play Private Lives, Amanda says, “extraordinary how potent cheap music is,” and Katherine & Pierre is evidence of that. The collision of a straight, heteronormative love story with a camp soundtrack and drag-inspired performance aesthetic gives the show an authentic, queer, épater la bourgeoisie edge.
I loved this show. Ellie and Bobbie are ridiculously talented and Katherine & Pierre is stupidly good. At the end, even the chairs took a bow and they deserved it. As far as I can tell, Birmingham is the last stop on the tour, but if they find another venue, then I urge you to see it. If they don’t, then watch out for the next one. TalkSmall are the real thing, and if this is what the next generation of theatre-makers looks like, then count me in.