Kate Butch’s 2024 show, Wuthering Shites, served a one-woman variety cabaret of live vocals, lip-syncs, and heavy audience interaction. The RuPaul’s Drag Race alum’s follow-up feels like a personal challenge: can Butch deliver an entertaining hour with no songs or structured shenanigans?
This is a stand-up show – even, perhaps, an old-fashioned one, with Butch freeing herself to stand and deliver jokes on topics including oat milk, an imagined French edition of Coronation Street, and Spanish diacritical marks.
There is structure here, with a through-line of homophobic abuse, starting with schoolyard bullying and closing on the savagery of online comments Butch now-receives as a drag queen and non-binary TV personality. But the bulk of the show is a pick-and-mix of assorted topics. In one riff, Butch declares that – having won nothing as an adult, on TV or otherwise – she’s gunning for a Joke of the Fringe award, only to deliver a series of options that start with the decidedly award-unfriendly “did you hear about the paedophile who…”.
Happily, there and elsewhere, Butch proves herself a wonderful joke writer – and one whose next show might well do a better job of joining together disparate topics and building a smoother ramp to its emotional climax.
Review: Kate Butch: A Kate in the Hand is Worth Two in the Butch, Pleasance Dome, until 30 Aug (not 19), 8pm