Sara Pascoe vs the Apocalypse

Judgment Day is imminent, or so we’ve been told. The Rapture, pencilled in for this May, never happened. Nostradamus was so vague he’s bound to nail it someday. The Mayans’ prediction? That’s a matter for 2012, but Sara Pascoe was at least sufficiently convinced to build her second solo effort around it.

What begins with a bastardised cover of REM’s ‘It’s the End of the World…’ and a purposely shoddy PowerPoint presentation soon meanders away from doom-mongering to become a manifesto for Pascoe’s ideal world. Unfortunately, the writing often sinks into aimless, laugh-light tangents that sap the show’s momentum and do little justice to intermittent moments of brilliance.

Whether shambling her way through politically correct porn or the origins of misogyny, her fertile and ridiculous imagination removes trite observation from the equation. And a knack for sideways thinking means the conclusions she reaches are rarely anything but fresh – even if the pay-offs are relatively low-impact.

It’s all wrapped up in a peculiar, fey persona that borders on a character act. Distracted and half-arsed in the face of a notional apocalypse, she deadpans flights of fancy and slips in Nietzsche references with the air of a dim-witted adolescent.

Her arrogance is deliberately unconvincing and on this first night of the run it's even more so – though she’s clearly well aware of the room for improvement. With some tighter writing and quality control Pascoe could yet live up to the low-level hype she enjoyed last year, though if we really are headed for oblivion in 2012, she doesn’t have long.