In her latest hour, family favourite Lucy Porter reflects on her younger, more radical self with trademark warmth and verve.
An infectiously cheerful hour from a natural performer
‘If you’re in your twenties, this show is not for you’, she says as she stands beside a drinks trolley, doling out sherry to members of the audience. ‘There’s lots of adult material in here: grouting, caravan holidays…’ Consequences is a show about getting older and the accompanying slide from the radical to the mundane. Porter is a pleasure to watch and a generous performer, easing us in with some light audience interaction and a brilliant bit on London’s travel zones as Dante’s circles of hell.
People flock to Porter’s performances for her conversational, easygoing persona and beautifully-recounted anecdotes, and the sold-out auditorium is filled with the young and old alike. She’s universally appealing and makes it look simple, deftly weaving safer material about her sixteen-year-old self with the more political stuff on censorship, safe-spaces and transphobia. Despite an odd bit about the deradicalisation of extremists and a joke about being “pan”-sexual, Porter overall does a wonderful job of making accessible issues which her generally older audience might not otherwise engage with.
This is a well-crafted show which gifts us plenty of callbacks and pleasingly wraps them up at the end. An infectiously cheerful hour from a natural performer, there’s nothing to shock in Consequences, but that’s the charm of it. It certainly makes you want to have a natter with Lucy Porter over a cuppa: the perfect teatime treat.
