As a Lancashire girl myself, I have loads of reasons to take umbrage about Tom Wainwright’s second one-man show, a character-based monologue focused on a self-proclaimed ‘fat cow’ from my home county. Wainwright follows up his 2010 Edinburgh smash hit, Pedestrian, with Buttercup: ‘a fick, a fat and an ugly’ whose ignorance and credulity have made her the unlikely candidate for (or victim of) reality TV stardom. Buttercup sees no need to brush her teeth as she’s never been kissed and her family lifestyle of sitting and gorging in silence for hours in front of the TV is enough to move even a hard-faced ‘child’ producer from the BBC to tears. But the subject of this satire’s vitriol isn’t really Lancashire, its media land: that better place (probably in North London) where lives are made more meaningful through dint of better cooking, home décor and TV-sponsored craft projects.
It’s handled with deceptive acuity by this gummy, daft character performed engagingly in drag and a 1970s smock-tabard. Buttercup’s story is one of a character fully absorbed into the unrealities of reality TV: here America is a TV show and the presenters of Masterchef disintegrate into their foodstuff archetypes: a fish and a potato (I’ll leave you to figure out who is who). It’s a dystopian vision that is, like all great satire, believable enough to be chilling.
It’s a total pleasure to watch Wainwright perform: his exhilaratingly precise physicality supports quick-fire character changes, cycling through astutely drawn caricatures from Masterchef and TOWIE, as well as the nostril flaring, tail flicking bravura of straight talking Buttercup herself as she’s encouraged to model the harsh realities of her life to the templates offered by telly land. She’s an uncannily endearing character, stoic in the face of personal catastrophe and a media mauling, and ultimately her story is redemptive, as real feelings triumph over manufactured narratives.
How we fit into the critique is a little harder to discern. The show is placed in a rather swish café here at Pulse and at times we are decisively drawn into the action through some bits of audience participation and an improvised Q & A whose steel-fist-within-a-lacy-glove tone reminded me of the 90s talk-show The Mrs Merton Show. I didn’t miss any of the production values a studio context could have given, but wondered if the thoughtful Wainwright missed a trick in the way he deals with us, the audience – as complicit and implicit in the fiction-making process of theatre as any BBC producer.