Lucie Pohl: Apohlcalypse Now!

Lucie Pohl is a very punnable name, the woman herself notes: "Pohl Position, Pohl Dancer, Pohlka Dot." It's shame then that this is as close to a constructed joke as she comes in Apohlcalpyse Now, an hour brimming with energy but featuring precious little in the way of humour. 

Her pohlemic (she can have that one for free) targets the people and circumstances that have made her 2016 a miserable experience. Or so she tells us. It's difficult to foster empathy for a person whose main issue seems to be that her attractiveness is simply causing too many other attractive people to fall in love with her. That and the fact that her starring role in a Stephen Baldwin film isn't quite the fairy tale she'd hoped for. 

With wide-eyed zeal and a taste for hyperbole, the American comic recounts a series of sprightly stories from the past year of her life, each one intercut with musical motifs and lighting cues straight out of a student drama production. Just like most anecdotal comedians, it seems everyone she knows is a kooky, larger-than-life character with a corny voice and a catchphrase. She's full of zip and verve and other adjectives people use to describe hyperactive adolescents, which would be engaging enough in itself but for the alarming lack of punchlines. 

By the end you realise she only has one or two moves to play, and they're repeated ad infinitum. Perhaps audiences across the Atlantic are satisifed with exuberance alone, but here it feels like a big cheery bite of nothing.