★★★★☆
Ange Lavoipierre rewrites The Exorcist in a disturbingly funny, unexpectedly profound sketch show on insomnia and online addiction. Here’s our Your Mother Chucks Rocks and Shells at the Edinburgh Fringe review.
When David Gordon Green’s reboot of the Exorcist franchise, Exorcist: Believer, comes out later this year, it will no longer just have the original movie and its sequels to live up to. It will also compete with Ange Lavoipierre’s lucid-dreamed version, where Fathers Karras and Merrin drive around Reagan’s consciousness on a golf buggy hunting for leather shorts.
In a completely absurd hour fusing stand-up, sketch and a bit of ASMR, Ange Lavoipierre follows her sell-out 2022 show with something far, far weirder. That much is clear from the start, which sees the comedian attempt to find which audience member makes the best mattress before starting a conversation with her inexplicably French brain and a very sexy interpretation of the internet.
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As you might have reckoned by now, Your Mother Chucks Rocks and Shells is a very difficult show to explain coherently – and that’s before Lavoipierre starts mashing up versions of The Exorcist with increasingly obscure films.
What’s odd then is that, especially for a sketch show, the set shows a remarkable tonal coherence. Everything going on is undeniably nuts, yes – but underneath it all is a soul which seems to have something to say.
Quite what that is, I’m not entirely sure. Maybe it’s a genuine dissection of the themes of The Exorcist; maybe it’s an examination of information overload via the internet; and maybe it’s just the fevered rage-dream of someone who keeps waking up at 2am.
All I know for sure is that Your Mother Chucks Rocks and Shells is very funny, very weird, and very smart. I just couldn’t confidently tell you why.
Ange Lavoipierre: Your Mother Chucks Rocks and Shells is playing at The Wee Coo in Underbelly, George Square until 27 August. Check out the rest of our Edinburgh Festival Fringe coverage here.
