Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2005

Pramface
Gilded Balloon, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Dolan Cummings
posted 27 August 2005

Pramface is very much a performer's piece, a vehicle for the comic talents of Lizzie Hopley, who plays both the eponymous heroine, and her antagonist, a celebrity gossip magazine editor. Both roles are portrayed with enough well-observed realistic detail to bring the stereotypes to life.

Pramface herself is the living incarnation of the worst middle class prejudices about chavs, neds and the denizens of unlovely housing estates, utterly absorbed in the culture of reality TV, makeovers and disposable celebrity. But Pramface is neither a straightforward joke at the expense of impressionable working class teenagers, nor a polemic against the snobbery of their detractors. Instead it combines both by focusing its satirical ire on the magazines that promote superficial celebrity culture. This makes the play politically ambivalent, since it is difficult to separate a critique of such magazines from one of their readers without suggesting that the latter are pretty stupid as well as impressionable.

But if Pramface unwittingly feeds into a quasi-political disdain for contemporary culture, its real appeal is more straightforward, and more likely to appeal to semi-detached, pseudo-ironic Heat readers than to genuine cultural Olympians, or people like Pramface herself (inasmuch as such people exist outside the imaginations of magazine editors). When a local boy who made it onto a TV talent show slashes his own face after being humiliated by snobbish commentators, Pramface takes it upon herself to exact a suitable grisly revenge on the magazine editor. The idea is slight, but the performance is virtuoso.