Olga Koch: Fat Tom Cruise comedy review – Penetrating insight
The thoughtful comic reflects on the more toxic elements of her youth with her trademark wickedness and wit
Breezily cosmopolitan, freely sex positive, possessed of archly manipulative cunning and with a working knowledge of 20th-century American legal legislation on gender discrimination, Olga Koch is a commanding stage presence. All this while casually dancing in her segues between scenes or baldly stating that her versatile set design is a time machine. When she opens the show with a gossipy strand of conversation with her best friend, the pair of them high on cocaine and speaking their minds, you intuit that someone is about to be flayed alive in sassy mockery. Betraying strong mean-girl energy, she brazenly recounts the poison she poured into the ear of the girl who was seeing her adolescent crush, only to ultimately humiliate the guy when she finally got her claws into him.
Jumping back and forth in her story, Koch transports us from the nightclubs of Moscow to the deeply dysfunctional, time-honoured rituals of US frat-boy culture. With strong overtones for the current climate, she witnesses up close a debasing masculinity rooted in misogyny that also preys upon itself, her voyeuristic instincts putting her in harm’s way and gifting her a bit part in a gradually unfolding tragedy. Ultimately, of course, Koch is far more thoughtful and penetratingly insightful than her naive younger self, her tale suffused with empathy for doomed, desperate men, even as she retains her wickedly funny edge.
Olga Koch: Fat Tom Cruise, Pleasance Courtyard, until 30 August, 5.30pm; picture: Amy Hecht.