A well framed and executed blend of the personal and socially observant with the historical and mythical, Eleanor Morton’s latest Fringe hour dives into the lore and lure of mermaids, exploring their symbolism from conception to the present day. Rather higher in the public consciousness than usual thanks to their siren counterparts featuring in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey , Morton muses upon how they’ve always been expressions of gender and sexuality, even if chiefly through the desires of horny, hallucinating seamen.
Residing on a rock, resplendent in glittering green tail and tempting her tech with the promise of crisps, the stand-up revels in and critiques her subject, peppering her potted history of the creatures with witty, Philomena Cunk-style malapropisms. Gradually though, she begins to relate the meaning of mermaids for her growing up, where her red hair cast her as an othered freak and inadequate sex education and body issues arrested Morton’s development into womanhood.
Slyly satirical about the manosphere, she explicitly mocks men such as the utterly dysfunctional Little Mermaid author Hans Christian Andersen, obsessive filmmaker and deep sea explorer James Cameron and the exploitative P.T. Barnum, hardly the attractive figure played onscreen by Hugh Jackman. Going deep in its candid disclosure, The Mermaid scales the heights in terms of recasting vulnerability as assertiveness.
Eleanor Morton: The Mermaid, Monkey Barrel Comedy (Cabaret Voltaire), until 30 Aug, 1pm