Despite introducing herself as your favourite comedian under 5’2, Sophie Duker is anything but short of energy when she bounds onto stage. Before I knew it, she was in a handstand, twerking on the face of The Stand’s iconic – or in Sophie’s words “pervy” – cowboy.
The crux of being “delulu” is the blind faith that you’re palpably cool and every stranger wants to have sex with you
To open the show, she got the crowd warmed up, searching for “young people” and “sexy people” among us, and even choosing a man in the crowd to represent her father for the evening, henceforth known as Daddy Kevin. She then introduced us to a central theme of the show – being “delulu”. To Sophie, the crux of being “delulu” is the blind faith that you’re palpably cool and every stranger wants to have sex with you. But when she asked her friends which words sum her up, she instead got the answer “daddy issues”, bringing us amusingly to the real heart of the show. A harrowing text from her dad – “Was I a good father?” – led down a winding path to daddy-daughter therapy sessions with Michelangelo, a candid Italian hilariously impersonated by Sophie. All because Sophie took on the delulu mantra, “do it for the plot”.
She reminds us that we can always be united by a tendency to act completely delusional
The show features several wild elements, from portraits of her idiosyncratic parents to dating mishaps, reaching its crescendo with a brazenly tone-deaf song and dance number about her brief online encounter with a sugar daddy. Sophie even included a perfectly timed dig at Ouseburn, just to let you know she’s done her research. Her engaging storytelling weaves together the cost-of-living crisis, queerness, the often turbulent reality of parental relationships with just a touch of misanthropy. Though she keeps the really juicy details of the therapy sessions private for obvious reasons, she reminds us that we can always be united by a tendency to act completely delusional from time to time.
After an hour of high-energy and high-excitement comedy, with a message from Daddy Kevin that almost stole the show, its hard to leave without absorbing some of Sophie’s infectious excitement and confidence. And just in case I needed any more proof that the subtext of the show was successfully conveyed, on the way out I heard a middle-aged straight man say to his wife, “I would ask her for a selfie, but Sophie would think that was creepy”.