daring and inventive and thats more than un oeuf

Come and see a silly clown show about eggs, they said. How delightful, I thought. Just the thing to lighten the heart in the run-up to Christmas. Reader, be warned: Natalie Palamides’s Laid is, indeed, a silly clown show about eggs, but it’s also as dark and uncompromising in its absurdist critique of the human condition as anything by Samuel Beckett. Go expecting a gentle pick-me-up, and the yoke’s on you. 

A hit at the 2017 Edinburgh Fringe, this is not a show for anyone squeamish about profanity, blood and razors, salmonella, the trauma of miscarriage, or the sight of a woman biting the head off a raw fish with all the gusto of Ozzy Osbourne tucking into a bat. Then again, anyone who caught Palamides’s equally provocative 2020 Netflix special Nate (or her earlier live version) would already be on their guard. That show, performed in a handlebar moustache, was all about masculinity; this one’s messy, madcap portrait of womanhood completes the diptych. 

It starts off innocently enough. The young American comic first appears trapped in a giant egg costume, burbling sweetly but wordlessly for assistance. Once a few willing punters figure out how to help yank her out (there’s a lot of playful audience interaction throughout the hour), Palamides emerges from her shell as a kind of 1950s housewife archetype, in a smart gingham dress which will, by the end of the hour, be bespattered with half a dozen different fluids. 

Like Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days, our clownish everywoman is doomed to keep living the same day, though with enough variation to keep the audience on their toes. Initially perky, though increasingly desperate and foul-mouthed, she wakes, brushes her teeth, shaves, has a shower, cheerfully peruses a sopping wet newspaper (“Ooh! School shooting!”) and doubles over with menstrual pain – before laying an egg.

“Every day I’m faced with this decision: do I raise my egg or do I eat it?” She toys with the former – “I’ll name her Cynthia!” – but poor Cynthia is not long for this world. Within moments, the egg is scrambled on an onstage grill, and gulped down to the strains of a funeral dirge by a tearful Palamides, now in mourning weeds. Many of Cynthia’s siblings will meet the same fate before the night is out. 

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