Kate Lucas: Whatever Happened to Kate Lucas

“Come in, come in – we’re just talking about death,” says Kate Lucas with a grin, as a couple of latecomers wander into the bunker and wonder what they’ve let themselves in for. Lucas is a wolf in sensible clothing; nice with an undercurrent of nuts.

Her full repertoire of sinister weirdness takes a while to fully emerge here, but it’s pretty evident from the outset that Whatever Happened to Kate Lucas is not for the easily offended. As our genial-looking host explains, the show has a running theme about her fear of death, and the songs explore dark variations on it. One early composition involves her angrily haunting a chap in the audience who dared to move on after she died; which is fair enough, given how it mythically happened.

Lucas won a prestigious best newcomer award earlier this year, and a fair bit of her material isn’t particularly nasty, just plain funny; both her songs and general repartee resound with fine wordplay. Although perhaps those more-accessible moments are just there to soften us up for the verbal uppercuts to come.

There’s a song about a self-built boyfriend and dead celebs that screams ‘too soon!’, while an increasingly intense tune about wasting your time with someone boring contains one of the most shocking lines you’ll hear all Fringe. The reactions are fascinating: belly laughs and wide-eyed did-she-really-say-that horror. 

It’s Lucas’s apparent normality that really gives these moments such clout, and though that theme holds this show together impressively, it does still end with an uplifting message. Don’t have nightmares, folks.