Review: Lazy Susan: Forgive Me, Mother!

Playfully funny #TimesUp satire from sketch duo

★★★★
comedy review (edinburgh) | Read in About 2 minutes
Published 11 Aug 2018
33329 large
100487 original

Forgive Me, Mother! feels like Lazy Susan's coming-of-age show – the moment Celeste Dring and Freya Parker truly make good on the promise of their double-act. Though not without its flaws, shifting the emphasis more to their own on-stage personas than characters affords it real narrative coherence and zip, with Dring flirtatiously upfront, Parker a wild-eyed maelstrom of anxiety.

After a memorable introduction, their room is a safe space, they reassure. And, they protest rather too much, the show definitely has no agenda, certainly not about gender. Right. From their portrait of a whimsical Frenchwoman conceived by a man (Dring's Gallic-manic pixie dream girl bringing out the awkward, Anglo-Saxon pragmatist in her partner), to strutting their stuff as “sexy women with a catch” (because there's always a catch, isn't there fellas?) they present deliberately over-the-top satires on the current climate of sexual harassment exposure. The appeal of witnessing them pull on balaclavas is not so much wondering if they're going to be park rapists, but anticipating how they will pull off this grim skit. As it is, their insecure, snowflake-y and perversely modern felons are a bit too signposted, their millennial preoccupations over-elaborated. And Dring chatting up a guy in the crowd feels like filler.

But there's more going on than is initially obvious. The pair string their sketches together with little episodes of tension between them, setting up a dementedly funny, subversive finale in which they reveal their true selves. Zeitgeisty but playfully arch, it's supremely well done from a duo capably extending themselves.