“What’s your favourite phallus?” asks performance artist Sophia Cleary in her fringe set It Gets Worse. A contender comes in the form of the super-sized Titan leaf blower that features down the road in Until Death, directed by Cleary and written and performed by Nalini Sharma, a fellow LA comic making her Edinburgh debut.
The device is wielded by one of three audience members brought on stage to help Sharma, in the breathy guise of wine-swigging “Marilyn Merlot”, recreate the subway grate scene from The Seven Year Itch. Handheld and floor fans are also directed between Sharma’s legs as, halter-top dress billowing, she swaps Monroe’s carefree delight for a series of ribald, pleasure-seeking demands.
When Monroe first filmed her scene in New York, it was amid dozens of male photographers and onlookers’ catcalls – the star’s divorce was announced weeks later. Sharma, who trained at Philippe Gaulier’s clown school, makes her tribute a joyous team effort even if the game trio alongside her make up roughly half tonight’s audience.
That’s a shame because while it does not yet feel fully formed, Until Death has some perturbing and pleasingly silly scenes. It was inspired by Sharma’s stay in hospital after a motorcycle accident and, against a soundscape of bleeps and anonymous chatter, the show combines quotidian infirmary life with hallucinatory fancy.
In an act that bleeds between theatre, clowning and character comedy she introduces an ailing shock-haired patient who relieves herself in the front row, a Middle American busying herself with needlework while awaiting her husband’s death, and an adolescent boy, bursting with frustration as he visits his recuperating sister.
Not all those characters are crystallised but there are some movingly wistful memories of a married woman’s flirtations with a stranger and, well, then there’s the bat. Sharma adds wings to her costume to become the hospital’s flying interloper in scenes where her intermittent co-star, Mike Rose, gives pursuit – their chases at one point taking a series of surreal turns to become a slalom.
Even at its most ridiculous, the comedy is pervaded by a sense of mortality – with overdone reminders of this venue’s surgical history and attempts to clear its persistent “scent of human remains”. Far more effective is a chant of “death, death, death” that haunts through the audience’s wavering uncertainty in both beginning and ending the chorus.
Throw in a charged bit of burlesque and it makes a batty debut that proves Nalini Sharma – on occasion miscalled Narnia, she laments – is an act of fantastical promise and a name to remember.
At theSpace @ Surgeons Hall, Edinburgh, until 26 August
