Lucy McCormick @ Underbelly, Cowgate
Triple Threat's 'shock' take on the Bible is just plain tiresome
The ostensible premise of Triple Threat is a comedy piss-take of the nativity, and Lucy McCormick’s show starts promisingly enough. As two half-naked – though modern-dressed – angels bound into view, it's like a Matthew Bourne fantasy made flesh, albeit a strangely delinquent one.
However, it starts to rot rapidly as McCormick takes every cheap shot she can to make the critics notice her. This includes: being 'impregnated' by an angel with a vibrator, writhing around on the floor naked from the waist down, being squirted with mayo, getting fingered by Doubting Thomas in her nostril, earhole, eyehole, followed by the next hole, and yep, the hole after that.
All in all, it's an attrition of cringe and none of it shocking. This story is over 2,000 years old. If there’s a way to rip it, it’s been thought about, joked about, written about, drawn about and acted out already. Maybe back in the day when this wasn’t the most secular country in Europe (and we hadn’t all suffered two decades of reality TV and the like) it might have felt daring: however, nowadays, it just feels... well, banal.
Those angels were great, though. A star for each of them.
Lucy McCormick: Triple Threat, Underbelly, Cowgate (Iron Belly), 4-28 Aug (not 10, 15 & 22), 8.10pm, £6-12