CRUDI DENCH: SOMEONE HELP HER! WundaBarn @ Brighton Fringe

There is a particular kind of drag that operates like a heat-seeking missile locked onto joy, loud, shameless, gloriously weaponised warmth and Crudi Dench has it in abundance. Part delusional diva, part forensically honed performer, part something altogether harder to name, she arrives at the WundaBarn like a cabaret show glimpsed through a kaleidoscope after three espresso martinis, all charisma and catastrophe, the whole enterprise careening with magnificent purpose toward its own spectacular unravelling.

The conceit is delicious: Crudi is taping the pilot of her very own television spectacular, in the grand tradition of a certain Scouse national treasure, a light entertainment queen-of-the-people who made ordinary folk feel seen and celebrated. Crudi's Northern roots do exactly this heavy lifting, they position her instantly as that woman your mother always watched on ITV. The one with all the gossip. The one you trusted completely despite every available warning sign. Her celebrity guests, she explains, are scattered throughout the audience, and she will need their help. The audience, for their part, looks both thrilled and faintly terrified. The phone rings randomly with a person requesting help, Crudi is ready!

The audience interaction threatens to draw blood and then, consistently, refuses to. What looks momentarily like it might curdle into cruelty pivots, every time, into something generous. People are pulled into Crudi's orbit and leave it grinning. She is overly familiar in the way of a particularly fabulous auntie, all invasive warmth and unsolicited opinions, and her occasional plunges into full-throttle vulgarity land with the precision of a knowing wink, deployed not from desperation but from choice, as if to remind you she could go there any time she likes, and isn't it fun that she just did. It is a tease. It is extremely good.

But Someone Help Her! is considerably more interesting than it first declares itself to be. Running beneath the glitter is a persistent structural joke; Crudi's constant, slightly panicked references to her producer, to the man behind her, that begins to accumulate weight as the hour progresses. The show pivots, then pivots again, moving out of familiar drag territory into something genuinely meta, the fourth wall dissolving until Crudi is addressing her creator directly, and he, in a moment of theatrical courage, is addressing her back. It emerges that Matt Stallworthy, the performer behind the mouth of Crudi, is the one who has been making all the calls for help, a creator who built something enormous and now finds himself speaking through it, searching for a way back to himself. The show delves with real seriousness, on the mental health pressures that brought Crudi into being, a breakdown as birthplace and breakthrough, and asks, pointedly, whether the drag creation that saves you might also be the thing that consumes you.

This is bold territory, and the ambition deserves recognition alongside the honest note that the stitching between Crudi's glittering surface and these deeper currents is still visible in places. The tonal gear-changes are occasionally abrupt; the serious reflective passages and the sequined chaos haven't yet found the seamless conversation they're reaching for. There is work still to do here, and the potential to do it is absolutely present. This is a generous show with a profound heart, and the audience responds accordingly.

The jokes land. The audience leaves happy. The show earns its huge applause completely.

And yet. When we file out into the Brighton night, we leave Crudi behind, alone, in a big empty tent, the lights dimming around her. She was made to help. She was made, perhaps, to be needed. The thought stayed with me as long as the laughter did. She needs us. Someone help her.

Sequins, sabotage, and a small existential crisis; Brighton's most dangerous diva delivered.

Full details of the show via Fringe website and upcoming shows from Crudi can be seen here.