Well-acted, wittily scripted film about disabled women in lockdown that is both funny and hard-hitting
Produced by disabled-led theatre company Little Cog, Funny Peculiar focuses on four women coping with the Covid-19 crisis in different ways.
Glamourous Zsa Zsa (Liz Carr) organises driveway cocktail soirées and sneers at communal bingo sessions. Bingo organiser Blanche (Mandy Colleran), rallies the neighbourhood to support those most vulnerable. So does Cuba (Bea Webster), who runs a soup kitchen when she’s not at home gaming or indulging in some quality masturbation. Raquelle (Vici Wreford-Sinnott, who writes and directs) debates a return to comedy, but is held back by fear of the spotlight.
Often funny, the show skewers the details of the ‘new reality’ – from the one-upmanship of sourdough to trying to find different ways of saying "these unusual times" – the film is acted with verve by a strong cast who establish these women as individuals, not mere cyphers.
It builds from witty comedy into something more hard-hitting, not shying away from the reality of disabled women’s experiences in a culture that too often infantilises, erases or ignores them. It also exposes the public response to the pandemic, which seems all too ready to write off whole chunks of the population as disposable.
Like most lockdown monologues it’s limited by its format, but it’s not scared to play with the form. A fourth-wall-breaking finale that sees the cast strip away the trappings of character to reveal the actors underneath, makes for a powerful concluding message: we are here, we matter, and we aren’t to be ignored.
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