Snatch Paradise

As a shrieking siren heralds the approach of five women dressed like hookers at Halloween, it soon becomes clear that no noise could better set the tone for this, one of the most rabidly obscene hours on offer this year.

Snatch Paradise marks the return of writer Van Badham, the Australian former anarchist whom Fringe audiences last saw bating fundamentalists with 2007’s Cash in Christ. This time it’s a trashy attack on vulgar modern celebrity, tracing the downfall of amnesiac boyband member D-Star (played in a felt-tip goatee by a slapheaded Shannon Dooley) and his cutthroat tart of a girlfriend. Stripping all glamour from the age of sex tapes, fake tits and orchestrated paparazzi traps, this barrage of bad taste achieves little more than an exercise in pushing boundaries.

The cast members compete to be the most repulsive, diving headlong into their roles – and here that can mean anything from swaggering around with stuffed crotches to pointless nudity, to sexual slapstick, convulsing and thrusting in a manner as grotesquely puppet-like as the vacuous C-listers they play.

The music, meanwhile, is deliberately schmaltzy and hamfistedly provocative, scoring points for accurately parodying the likes of the Pussycat Dolls. At its heart it is irreverent, anti-consumerist—maybe even feminist—but these sentiments are lost in a show rammed home with such brutal force that any hope of Badham making her audience think (rather than simply recoil) is quickly dashed. This, the theatrical equivalent of being battered with a dildo wrapped in a copy of Heat, will leave you longing for a good scrub.