I very much enjoyed this berserk late-night hour from Alice Cockayne, a selection of inscrutable but hilarious character sketches that might offer a sort of anxiety dream interrogation of contemporary femininity, or might just be a load of random shit that exists purely for the lolz.
If that sounds hifalutin it’s definitely not: Cockayne has a colossal pair of fake boobs strapped to her for the entire show, starting with the lengthy opening scene in which she plays the deadpan owner of what one assumes to be a brothel, although all her working ‘girls’ – represented by wigs that are sometimes thrust at audience members – seem to be very old and have a lot of problems (‘riddled with neurodiversity’).
Other characters include the posh, wildly overbearing Penelope Jane Pendlewitch, whose entire worth is tied up in motherhood and who claims to have had ‘556 children’; a cleaner, also apparently incredibly old, who fills the air with cleaning spray and dirty thoughts; and an Eastern European woman with incredibly long nails.
To be honest, describing the characters doesn’t make them make sense and Licensed. Professional. Trained. Qualified. is one of those balls-trippingly weird shows that would conceivably not work if it were staged for an afternoon crowd (it is currently running in the 10.40pm slot). But while the WTF absurdity is a lot of the point, it’s Cockayne’s eye for layering her oddball creations with details that defines them - the brothel sketch is, among many other things, partly based around a joke about call centres that tell you to go to the website.
Does it mean anything? A lot of Cockayne’s sketches revolve around aspects of the female experience being pushed to nightmarishly absurd extremes. Even the only man she (kind of) plays feels like a surreal embodiment of a particular sort of fear: a boring punter who sees himself as a nice guy and bothers the brothel madam with an excruciatingly idiotic feminist rap.
Cockayne’s performance style is not so much impressively committed as totally chameleonic, blending with each of her characters, like actually having each of these disturbing people in the room with us. And because there’s no real sense given of who the real Alice Cockayne might be – I left somewhat hazy on what she looks like or what her accent is – we’re not given any winks or nudges to help us navigate her surreal menagerie. Even her seemingly sincere audience thanks at the end appears to have been yet another character. She’s an enigma, but a very funny one.
