Ange Lavoipierre @ Underbelly, George Square

With Final Form, Ange Lavoipierre brings together multiple disparate elements to make a cohesive whole. Final Form is dark, energetic, chaotic and insane

Review by James Gladdis | 16 Aug 2019
  • Ange Lavoipierre

The focus of Ange Lavoipierre's hour is that we present different versions of ourselves to others, depending on our connection to them. Lavoipierre gets this across through impeccable timing and over the top, frantic delivery bordering on what seems like a breakdown – albeit a carefully curated one.

To give the audience something of a blueprint to work with, Lavoipierre begins by discussing ‘context collapse’, a relatively new, social media related, psychological phenomenon caused by our inability to consolidate these multiple versions of ourselves due to everyone we know seeing every version simultaneously. Mind melting shit.

So to illustrate the ever-present mind-fuck this issue presents, Lavoipierre spends the next increasingly surreal hour belting out songs about what she wants in a man, before culminating in a logical extreme encapsulating the show’s core theme. We also get told the same story about snail genocide three times, in three wildly different ways, casting doubt on the veracity of any version of the story. There’s some sincerely gorgeous cello performances too, interspersed with jokes of course.

Overall, Final Form is a show about spending your whole life trying to be god-knows-how-many different versions of yourself for god-knows-how-many other people and coming to terms with the fact that maybe that’s okay; that maybe they make up a cogent, whole human being. Similar to how a show with circus music, cellos and stories about snail massacres can somehow become a beautifully coherent and thoughtful hour of comedy.


Ange Lavoipierre: Final Form, Underbelly George Square (The Wee Coo), until 26th Aug, 10.40pm, £8-£10