Concrete Playground

Claudia O'Doherty has a lively interest in the natural world. She's cowritten a book called 100 Facts About Pandas and performed a show called Monsters of the Deep 3D, for example. She also contributed a tale about killer whales to The Penguin Plays Rough Book of Short Stories, is part of a comedy group called Pig Island and premiered this current show at the Imperial Panda Festival earlier in the year. Its premise is that this is the TV show 'they' won't let O'Doherty make, and she takes audiences on a condensed tour of all 26 projected hours of the series and quite a long way into the personal life of a nearly unbearably intense and awkward character.

The performance's accoutrements include water, cake, lasers, the most unflattering pair of pants possible, a cold sore and a much-maligned offstage technician named Suze. It's absurd in a totally deadpan way that makes the audience nervous as to whether this might be for real at the same time as they're certain that it isn't. O'Doherty's stage presence is naive and not exactly scientifically rigorous, but the show is as clever as can be.