London's most opulent fringe venue opens with a brilliant no-holds-barred show

Telegraph

03-05-2025

Friday night saw London's newest and most opulent comedy venue open its doors with an extravagant bang thanks to US comedian Natalie Palamides. Quite a few 'bangs' in fact, if one's being smutty, which Palamides sure is − and certainly, as an opening, determinedly fringey mission statement and outrageously entertaining evening out, it is hard to see how this show could be bettered.
An offshoot of the much-loved Dean Street institution of similar name, Soho Theatre Walthamstow turns out to be quite a place. Built in 1930 as an astonishing 2,700-seater cinema, the building has been lovingly restored and transformed into a theatre with a still-ambitious 960 seats. ('Soho' don't seem to be publicising how much it cost, but we can safely go with: a packet.)
The auditorium is marvellous, a grand, old-school space with luxurious, Alhambra-inspired trimmings, good leg-room and excellent raking and sight-lines. There's a capacious foyer with a disco ball the size of Jupiter, two large and well-staffed bars, and you can get a naan wrap for a tenner. Plus, it's barely five minutes' walk from the local Tube station. What's not to like?
First aired in Edinburgh last summer, the show with which Walthamstow is setting out its stall echoes the venue in terms of being at once reassuringly old-fashioned and utterly modern. A no-holds-barred comic paean to the big-screen romances of the 1990s, and flipping between 1999 and 1996, Weer sees Palamides simultaneously play both of the central lovers, Mark and Christina. (A bizarre quadruple coincidence for this particular writer, but that's quite another story.)
So, her right-hand side is Mark, all macho plaid shirt, cargo pants, short-ish 'male' hair, and preposterous painted-on stubble; but when she turns about 180 degrees, she's Christina: long hair, regular make-up, a pink top, groovy jeans. It's a clownish trope as old as the hills, but make no mistake: as anyone who caught Palamides's previous, full-bore creations Laid (2017) or Nate (2018) would expect, the material is bracingly and brilliantly 21st-century.
Going into the show, I'll admit I feared slightly that this performer who − be warned − loves to get the audience involved and thrives on the sense of a charged, intimate huddle, might be lost in the enormous space. But not a bit of it. A completely fearless atom-bomb of energy, she instantly fills the stage and auditorium alike with muscular misrule, and simply does not let up.
Roughly 80 minutes straight through, the show often uses surprise as a (very effective) weapon, so let's not go into too many particulars. But Palamides's mickey-taking of specific 1990s films and general filmic tropes is as marvellous as her casual, almost aggressive disregard for her props, and my, what an inspired and inventive physical comedian she is. She frequently turns on a sixpence to give us both characters' actions as good as simultaneously, a trick that works as perfectly in the moments off near-death melodrama as it does in the shamelessly funny, insouciantly semi-naked bedroom scenes.
You can't help feeling that this 'Zone 3', comedy-focused theatre has got its work cut out for it in terms of consistently putting bums on seats, especially given the fact that very few of the names on its extensive programme qualify as 'household'. But after an opening gambit as strong as this, how not to wish it well? At the curtain call, the still bare-breasted Palamides said how marvellous it was that 'small comedians' like her could experience being in a room like this. Amen to that, even if something tells me the astonishing Ms P, 5ft 1in though she is, won't be a 'small comedian' for very much longer.