Writer and comedienne Callum Tilbury names their drag creation Lady Aria Grey. But it is a demonic scarlet colour that dominates the wildly inventive and sublimely funny 60-minutes that is Grey Widow. From the character’s crimson lipstick to the plush vermilion of her armchair, to the burgundy of her neighbour’s gifted wine (“from Waitrose” she laments with a pained and dismissive wince), everything about Lady Aria’s story screams bright blood-red murder. She has killed her husband and, in this mashup of monologue, lip-sync, burlesque, and rhyme she is here to tell us why. If your taste veers towards dark comedy that feels like an X-rated, acid-fuelled, Bette Davis melodrama, then you have hit the jackpot with Grey Widow.
Lady Aria Grey is, of course, the great-aunt of Christian Grey, the troubled protagonist of E. L. James’ blockbuster BDSM romance, Fifty Shades of Grey. There is a hint here of how Aria’s erstwhile husband Lord Earl Grey, whom she describes as being as “complex and mysterious as a sudoku”, meets his demise.
The show is not really about Lord Earl’s murder per se, but about the whirlwind romance and subsequent ghostly events leading up to and after it. Brought together by a shared love of power and of Edith Piaf torch songs (Aria describes the French singer as having the voice of a “castrato lovechild of a vibrator and a lorry”), the couple first make love in a thorn-covered rose bush. There is some gory foreshadowing here of bloody events to come. Lord Earl’s later yearning for political success coincides with waning desire for his wife. The couple soon find themselves enmeshed in a complex web of sexual intrigue with neighbours David, who may possibly be a footballer, and his fashion-clad wife Victoria. Satanism, sex parties, and demonic possession soon follow.
Towards the end of the show Tilbury interrupts Lady Aria’s performance with a marvellously meta, fourth-wall breaking discussion of some of the more esoteric concepts underpinning drag comedy. It is in a witty intervention in its own right. It is also devilishly good reminder that underneath Grey’s purple-coiffured, Thatcher-like hairpiece lies a very well-informed comic writer.
Writer: Lady Aria Grey (AKA Callum Tilbury)
Director: Alex McCarthy
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