Degenerate
As the clock draws closer to the witching hour, on a cold concrete floor, a woman lies face down, her arms bound behind her back by thick black gaffer tape, another strip across her mouth to muffle her cries to have someone help remove it, the overall impression one which mars the impact of her elegant wine-red dress and otherwise immaculate styling, a diva in a moment of disarray.
A night with Maria Teresa Creasey is not predictable nor easy to categorise, her one woman show Degenerate, to paraphrase her own words, “not the strangest thing to have happened on a Fringe stage an hour before midnight,” but certainly not the most conventional either, less a show than a showcase of undefinable but undeniable talent, jumping between characters, settings, moods, genres and styles, an explosion of ideas as irreconcilable with the idea of structure as Humpty Dumpty’s sad remains.
Her own best cheerleader, she arrives with concealed red tinsel pom poms, though perhaps the deadliest weapon is the brick of an eighties mobile phone she pulls from her brown leather suitcase; miming at the microphone she channels the spirit of Blue Velvet as both victim and perpetrator of unspoken crimes, but faced with the injustice of aging the only solution is to become a vampire, eternally sexy, unapologetically deadly.
Speaking for us all she observes that “the hardest thing about being in my late thirties is that I’m not,” but with strange interludes of horror punctuating the hour giving herself to darkness is not a great step for a performer as bold and unrestrained as Creasey, fighting against the mocking decline of the avocado and the double standards of the youth-obsessed media and worth the price of admission for her singular rendition of Singing in the Rain alone.
Degenerate continues at Bunker One at the Pleasance until Saturday 23rd August
