Christmas Is Cancelled. Etcetera Theatre.

Kate Ghotti is one of the most successful TV personalities in the UK. She is also one of the most odious characters you are likely to see on stage this year: a malign, drug-addled, bullying, blackmailing, narcissistic “pick-me girl”, constantly in seek of male validation and jealous of other women’s success. In her ambitious new work Christmas Is Cancelled writer Tuula Costelloe asks us, perhaps dares us, to empathise with Ghotti. It is a very tough ask indeed.

An Essex fusion of Cabaret’s Sally Bowles (minus the personality and charm) and a young Norma Desmond (just as delusional but minus the talent), this manipulative, blood sucking vamp is not so much an antihero as an empty space. Her vacuous, vengeance-seeking persona is devoid of literally any redeeming features whatsoever.

Ghotti’s (played with feline abandon by Costelloe) relationships often involve “the currency between her legs” and are entirely transactional. She loathes herself, never apologises, and gives the impression of encouraging others to loath her in return. Of her equally repulsive friends she pronounces “as long as they have blood, I am going to drink it”. She even abuses Santa in a shopping mall.

So, when Ghotti’s erstwhile best-mate Jane (Rosa French on good form) and five former “assistants who couldn’t take a joke and called it harassment” gang up on her (we never get to hear exactly what horrors she is accused of) one cannot help thinking it is karma: what goes around, comes around. But hang on a minute Costelloe urges us, does even a character this destructive deserve what is about to happen to her?

Getting an audience to identify with someone who has no identifiable positive attributes is a neat trick, if you can make it work. Costelloe tries hard but does not quite pull it off.

Part of the problem is that Ghotti is so one-dimensional indeed almost cartoonish in her villainousness. Another problem is that much in the narrative is left unexplained. One baffling piece of audience interaction late-on seems to hint at the nefarious double-dealing of the journalistic profession, in the form of reporter and narrator Aisha (Lara De Belder), but mostly serves as a reminder of the fine line between making your audience do the work and leaving them entirely in the dark. There are times here you will be scratching your head in befuddlement.

Anas Zabadne is good as the sadistic tabloid newspaper editor Niall, as is Graeme Culliton as Ghotti’s deceitful and unreliable godfather. Megan Sangster convinces as the amoral sexually ambiguous TV executive Hana. Costelloe’s sneering, snarling, wild-eyed Ghotti, dressed in a skin-tight white bodice and thigh-boots, looks like she just home from a three-night rave in Ibiza.

Perhaps the writer herself cannot decide what kind of fate her character deserves, as different performances of Christmas Is Cancelled offer up an alternate endings. Ultimately you may not care very much.

Writer:  Tuula Costelloe

Director:  Hector Smith