Kate Berlant is Kate review – wicked and winningly daft performance lives up to the hype
Comedies don’t come hipper than this New York transfer from Kate Berlant. Its director is the prodigious talent behind lockdown hit Inside, Bo Burnham; Florence Pugh and Phoebe Bridgers were in its first-night crowd. To some extent, it’s a case of do believe the hype: Berlant is one of comedy’s most electrifying, distinctive talents. Her show, titled Kate Berlant is Kate, is a success qualified only by comparison with her even-more-brilliant standup – and with Liz Kingsman’s 2021 hit One-Woman Show, whose mickey-take of self-advertising solo performance this unmistakably echoes.
The show begins in the foyer, plastered with glorifying images of Berlant, and haunted by the 36-year-old herself, wearing a sign that reads: “Ignore me.” On stage, she recounts the supposed life story of this star-in-the-making, from young Kate’s romance with her absent dad’s camcorder, via the stifling of her talent by a hostile mum (“she smashed more than my camera that day; she smashed my dreams”) to Kate’s move to New York and a career on the stage. But the screen is her destiny, and – for the stoopidest of reasons – celluloid stardom remains tantalisingly out of reach.
Book-ended by the reflections of a cockney stage-hand, and frequently interrupted by real-Kate, haughtily patronising her public and fretting (as Kingsman did) about big-hitting talent scouts in the audience, the show makes hay with rags-to-showbiz-riches cliche, trauma as origin story, and the sanctity and/or moribundity of theatre. We’re never far from a barbed millennial aside, as when Berlant spots Freakonomics on the bookshelf of an NYC hook-up. The keynote, though, is silliness, as our heroine confronts the ultimate acting challenge with little more than a series of very ridiculous faces.
The closing stages are silly too, as the “real” Berlant steps out from the wreckage of both her big-time ambitions, and her show. I was surprised by the broad artificiality of this real-Kate; knowing Berlant and Burnham’s work, I expected something more complex or closer-to-the-bone. But if Kate isn’t as dizzyingly funny as its creator’s standup, nor as out-of-the-blue as Kingsman’s forerunner, it’s still a wicked and winningly daft takedown of showbiz self-regard, by one of the sharpest acts in comedy.
