Degenerate @ Pleasance Courtyard
Degenerate is a fevered collage of pop culture old and new, with a maniacal edge
The audience files in to Degenerate to find a woman lying on the floor, bound hand and feet, duct tape covering her mouth. It's the arresting first image of a fever dream of a show – a crazed collage of pop culture old and new.
Recovering from her initial indisposition, Maria Teresa Creasey is a charismatic but brittle host – with a slightly maniacal edge. The theme of the ageing woman emerges, that troublesome cultural presence (or absence, more likely). Creasey re-animates Sally's distress at approaching 40 in When Harry Met Sally stretching it into an absurdly extended wail (and she's right, it may well be the finest slo-mo acting you'll see at the Fringe). The figure of the vampire threads throughout, a central symbol of our preoccupation with eternal youth, and other horror motifs are there, too, with Creasey lip-syncing to segments of horror films. There are sudden virtuosic lurches into character: a gnarly Floridian reminiscing about the 1972 Republican primary; a crone bent double, sucking on a cigarette.
Creasey plucks objects out of a battered suitcase: an avocado and its brief window of perfect ripeness becomes a symbol for the fleeting moment of women's desirability. Indeed, the show as a whole feels like a play box of cultural bits and pieces – shiny objects that Creasey rifles through restlessly. Or perhaps what we're seeing is the random play of a porous mind. Whichever, meaning remains somewhere just out of reach, and the fragments refuse to cohere.
For all her fevered edginess, Creasey has an easy way with the audience; through her back-and-forth with the young men in the front row it gradually transpires there's an entire stag party in the audience. She rides out this shift in dynamic in masterful fashion, and Mike, the stag (one ear intriguingly painted blue), is a beautifully wholesome presence. It does feel like a room in which anything might happen – and that thrilling potential is borne out by a startling ending.
Degenerate, Pleasance Courtyard (Bunker One), until 23 Aug (not 19), 11.10pm, £11-13