Fierce

ADC Theatre, 23rd-26th November, 11pm, £4-6

Written & Performed by Kat Griffiths

[rating: 5/5]

I’m sitting next to a chicken carcass in the front row of the ADC and all I can think is that I need to buy some muesli. I realise that what I had anticipated to be a pleasant evening out had transformed into a fully-fledged ‘fierce’ experience.

It’s only after I’ve been watching a girl in white cotton pants chained to a bed ramble for five minutes that I realise how astonishing Griffiths’ feat is. The many personae she undertakes are developed flawlessly. Melbourney the Australian cook is a fridge-dwelling triumph. Maggie the fur-covered, jelly-tot-munching senior, a doll, and Felicity herself unnervingly honest, dangerously real.

It is all too easy to forget Griffiths is all alone on stage. The story she takes us on is one of constant gleeful surprise. The crazed artist gyrating to funky tunes, bottom wiggling like a ‘shark swimming backwards’ is a sight to behold in itself. Paired with the fast-paced, witty one-liners the show is undoubtedly a winner. The delivery is often so fast we fear we might not catch up; in laughing at one joke we might miss the next. Blaring atmospheric music can drown dialogue so we are left bewildered and a little lost before we find ourselves laughing again, from genuine amusement and often a lot of fear.

But part of the fun of this production is the frenzy in which it appears and disappears right before your eyes. Griffiths’ smooth transition between American drawl and Australian twang is impressive in its own right. It strikes a note of Gollumish schizophrenia, with an energised Griffiths leaping from her knees and down again as she creates a show down, an attempted kiss, an exchange of jelly tots. It’s a truly terrifying spectacle, surreal, but it had the audience hooked. There is a moment of terror when a contemplative pause turns out to actually be a mind-blank. But her cool recovery inspires a round of applause as she kicks off again.

One of the many joys of watching Griffiths was that as an audience member I feel completely relaxed in her presence. Okay, I got slightly tense when the eye-popping smile begin to approach at times, but the point is I wasn’t nervous for her in any way, and by all accounts an audience should be petrified. There she is – small, helpless, centre-stage, practically naked. Yet she holds her own; she is undeniably and eponymously fierce. She literally lays herself out bare for the audience, pants and all. It gets quite emotional at times; the dialogue so cripplingly intimate you begin to wonder if you’re really there at all; if you haven’t stumbled by mistake into someone’s traumatic childhood memoir, or therapy session.

It was a bit short, though. The single act had the audience reluctantly shuffling out with roused appetites. Not, I might add, for our friend the deceased chicken, whose perfumes pleasantly wafted across the stage throughout, but simply for more of Griffiths. She’s a show-stopping, brief-wearing, accent-laden, deliriously tasty treat. In the immortal words of an ancient fur-coated Maggie, ‘Today’s advice is muesli… muesli will change your life’. I’m on my way to Sainsbury’s to find out, but this show might just have changed it first.