THERE’S a moment in Daughter when performer/writer Adam Lazarus looks to the ceiling and emits a plume of red smoke. It looks like a Faustian moment; vivid confirmation that this relateable but flawed man has transformed from doting father to repellent sex criminal.
How radical we each view that transformation, and whether it is at all seems to be a key point here – another buzzy, one-man show written in response to #MeToo.
We first meet him in fairy wings, spinning a hula hoop to Beyonce’s Run The World, a track on his young daughter’s iPod. Supposedly awkward and self-deprecating, he cajoles the audience into validating his increasingly questionable actions. “Are you OK I did that?” he asks, saying how he threw his daughter onto her bed. “Understandable,” offers one audience member. “It’s OK, yes,” others agree. A few, The National included, give an emphatic “no”.
This man seems contemptible from the off, an egotist who cannot but help centre himself in every scenario he retells. Detailing how he catalogues pornography on the family computer so his wife and children are unlikely to find it, a man and a woman leave. Perhaps they are husband and wife. Many more laugh, however. This isn’t meant to be a comfortable show but an exploration of how violence against women and girls is normalised in pornography as a supposed form of entertainment.
|But hearing how “regular guys” like your husband may harbour a deep contempt for women cannot be a pleasant Fringe experience. Were they right to leave? All the worst ways men degrade and dehumanise women are depicted here.
Small wonder others leave too, and the amount of people laughing has shrunk to the occasional giggle. But none of this will come as the slightest surprise to women. Lazarus created this character a composite of real-life stories, and women have heard them all. But this isn’t a show for them, it’s a show for men – all men. As one of the (male) producers says in the vital after-show discussion, the value of Daughter (or not) is in how we choose to take our feelings about this character back into the world.
Until Aug 26, CanadaHub @ King’s Hall, 12.30pm (70mins), £11, £9 concs. Tel: 0131 560 1581. Tickets: bit.ly/DaughterKingsHall or canadahubfringe.com
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