Review: "Wild Bore" at The Soho Theatre

I like feminist, theatrical, commentating butts and I cannot lie.

Recently VBO went to watch Wild Bore at the Soho Theatre, but it has taken me a while to get round to writing this review because I felt conflicted. Conflicted because, on the one hand, I loved it, on the other hand, if I wrote a stonking stinker of a review I’d be in with a chance of actually featuring in the show… Tricky.

The piece ostensibly takes critiques of the three players’ work (Ursula Martinez, Adrienne Truscott, and Zoe Coombs Marr) and…critiques them, panel show-style...but, this is a panel show with a difference…

First up, this is NOT A FAMILY-FRIENDLY SHOW. DO NOT TAKE YOUR KIDS. DO NOT TAKE YOUR GRANDMA. I saw body parts. Loads of them. The show opens with a trestle table with three microphones and three, very opinionated lady butts. I ended up with a sore face from the alternating gasping and giggling.

I don’t want to give too much away, but I will say that this show was amazingly weird and amazingly good fun and that there is nothing like a group of grown women being deliberately, defiantly daft, to turn something which could have come across as bitter into a thing of joy.

I mean, this was a theatrical commentary on theatre commentary, so I fully appreciate it not being up everyone’s alley…but – and it’s a big but – it’s funny as hell. There are bum jokes (seeing a theme?), scorchingly acerbic reviews, and a strong dash of slapstick. (As a side note, all three of these women have excellent voices. I would listen to them read audio books. Preferably really serious ones.)

I do have some questions though:

• How do you wash a giant bum-mask once it’s covered in dog food? Do you dry-clean it?
• How do you grow the confidence to do an interpretive dance to the Titanic theme in front of theatre full of people?
• How does one walk like an anchovy?

Go see the show and let me know if you have any ideas.

A lot of the humour is that which might be more traditionally associated with men – loud, brash, perhaps a little infantile – and maybe that’s the point. Or is it? 

Or isn’t it? 

Whether it is, or it isn’t, Wild Bore isn’t for the faint-hearted, but it felt, to me, like a show which had come about from three funny, clever women, sitting together, drinking tequila and reading their bad reviews aloud to each other.

Credit: Tim Grey Photography 

Which sounds like a pretty excellent way to spend an evening, no?

It’s on until the 16^th December, so get a move on.