One party claimed “permanent traumatic brain injury, four broken ribs [and] loss of enjoyment of life”. The other “lost half a day of skiing”. Now the unconscious coupling of Gwyneth Paltrow and Terry Sanderson, who collided on a ski slope and faced off last year in a notorious trial, slaloms on to the stage. That should not be taken to suggest that Linus Karp and Joseph Martin – AKA Awkward Productions – have identified beneath all the privilege, idiocy and razzmatazz any wider implications or deeper dramatic currents. They have not. They’re here for the idiocy and razzmatazz, and so, dear viewer, must you be.
Karp himself, fresh from performing as Princess Di in Diana: The Untold and Untrue Story, stars as Paltrow: serene, superior, and – Karp being Swedish – sing-song Scandinavian. Martin is the septuagenarian optometrist who ploughs into her – or was it vice versa? – on the piste. The show has them meeting in the Deer Valley, Utah resort before the accident in question, ramping up the contrast between Sanderson’s “sad” life and Gwyneth’s glamorous one. It ramps up everything else, too: this is a camp cartoon, delighted by the affair’s every instance of shallowness, star-worship and bad faith.
That can be fun. The show is packed with jokes, if often the obvious ones (“I married Coldplay singer, and the colour beige personified, Chris Martin …”), and cheerfully unabashed by its basement-level production values. It co-opts the crowd to play supporting roles, including Paltrow’s husband-to-be and Sanderson’s girlfriend. (His lawyer is played by a muppet.) It shares with its audience a gossipy delight in the trial’s more outre episodes (“She really did ask her that!”)
I’m not sure those limited pleasures sustain for the two-hour duration. There’s plenty that’s extraneous, not least Gwyneth’s encounters with the (cardboard) “deer of Deer Valley” and its woodland pals. I felt a bit cheated that most of the songs are lip-synced rather than sung, for no clear reason. But Martin and Karp’s commitment to the undertaking, and the latter’s raised-eyebrow charisma, ensure that – unlike its protagonists – this arch courtroom drama / winter sports mashup avoids wipeout.
At Pleasance theatre, London, until 16 February
