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Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose
At breakneck speed and with the giddy energy of a camp moth, Keith Ramsay portrays a dozen queer mythologies through the voices of 50’s screen starlets, intercut and mediated through fragments of All About Eve. Summary
Rating
Excellent
Eve: All About Her is a new show entirely of its own. It is queer stories melded together, with the 1950 Bette Davis’ classic All About Eve beating underneath. This is a mishmash of divas, both girls and boys, and is camp throughout. It’s about love and sabotage. It’s about obsession and obsessives. And it is cut clearly from queer cloth. Like David M. Halperin’s How To Be Gay put through a blender.
Keith Ramsay’s performance is electric throughout and he works with such speed that he leaves nothing to hold on to but sparkler trails. His mannerisms suit the style perfectly. He is an uncanny mimic of Bette Davis, casting the most iconic of her looks and her ilk’s throughout.
The show has been created by queer people of all ages and Ramsay, an enigmatic creature, slips into their bodies with ease, perhaps even surreptitiously. It’s impossible to tell when stories end and turn into another until Bette returns. Three songs slow down the narrative for us and give it a much needed breather. This is a show with distressing scenes of death, violence, sex and suicide that are all tender and necessary but relentless nonetheless.
A particular highlight is a thread about a bathhouse cabaret star, which gives Ramsay the opportunity to sing us a dreamy Stormy Weather, conjuring up a chanteuse so fantastically, before ramping back up for a frenzied final story. By the end our performer is reduced to rags and black sweat mixed with mascara. This is a truly wonderful new work that sets the standard for exploring the richness of queer myth-making.
Produced by: Barbizon 63
Eve: All About Her plays at EdFringe 2022 until 28 August, 5.40pm. Further information and bookings can be found here.
