Simon Ward reviews TURTLE: A Story About Christ, Cancer, Kinks, and Christmas at the Aces & Eights Theatre

Although the bread-and-butter review circuit consists of rooms above pubs, there are a few venues where things are not quite that simple. Aces & Eights is one such example. It is a bar and pizza place located just across the road from Tufnell Park tube station. But go through the darkened door next to the Gents loos and suddenly a cabaret-style basement appears, studded with tables and chairs. On my visit, a single bar stool is perched onstage on top of an Indian rug.

Out steps not Liza Minelli but writer and performer Blake Stratso. Together with director-producer Alex Osborne he has put together a scabrously entertaining and raucously compelling account of a life. One spent grappling with the contradictions of his belief in an all-powerful, all-loving God and the catastrophically terrible things that have happened to him and his loved ones. He is wracked with Catholic guilt, yet cannot shake loose from the sense that his faith gives him a framework in which to live a good life. The title TURTLE seems to refer to a childhold incident when he was punished by his teacher, a nun, because he coloured his turtle picture in yellow. His severe colour-blindness was apparently no excuse.

As he rackets through school days and into adolescence and beyond, his lifestyle and behaviour is increasingly at odds with what the church would recommend, yet he continues to wear his crucifix. Indeed, even his baby sister’s diagnosis with cancer doesn’t stop him believing, though it does make him baffled and angry. He is relentlessly, acerbically funny throughout, but the fuel for his humour is a burning furnace of rage. Rage against the preposterous absurdity of a life where he gets to live out his dreams, engaging in frequent and passionate sex with a fiancée who loves him while his sister will never have any of those things. Rage, also, perhaps, against the absurd hypocrisies of the priests and nuns who spend their time chastising and criticising the very things of which they themselves are guilty – there is an amusing scene in the confessional where he is effectively banned from the church for listing his porn use.

The TURTLE title also seems to have another resonance. The brittle, witty, sharp-tongued storyteller is the tough outer shell, a facade under which there lurks a much softer, more delicate and more fragile underbelly. The fear of being vulnerable and of being wounded give rise to the wise-cracking and the banter. As the piece comes to its conclusion the mask is torn away and the real, raw emotions are almost too much to bear. There is real guilt here, real remorse and an all-too painful confession of inadequacy.

A one-man show, it is enhanced by interspersed recordings of multiple off-stage characters interacting with our protagonist. The large cast of voice actors (Giles Malcolm as France, Gözde Kanyilmaz as the fiancée, Capucine Earle as Ali, Andrew Friedman as the priest, Sarah Thorn as Clown Girl, Moir Leslie as Sister Jo, Adelaide Lenard as Dr Ross and Victoria Woodward as Momma Fiancée) has a huge impact on the emotional heft of the piece. It is a rollercoaster ride, from which you will emerge shaken, but also deeply moved. And there are a lot of laughs along the way.

TURTLE: A Story About Christ, Cancer, Kinks, and Christmas previewed at The Old Red Lion on 21st July and played at Aces and Eights on 31st July and 7th August as part of the Camden Fringe Festival