Olga Koch comes bounding on to the stage and tells us she needs a time machine to tell her story, to prevent someone being born – at which point a reference to a certain happening in Nazareth 2026 years ago flashes up on the onstage screens. It’s the first of several neat gags – many of them throwaway – in which she provides the set-up, and the payoff follows on the screens.
It’s a catchy addition to what is essentially a good old-fashioned piece of storytelling that’s fast-paced and whipsmart. In Fat Tom Cruise (directed by Jet Vevers) Koch dances along a timeline that skips between present day and the 1970s as she sets out on a seemingly straightforward story prompted by her years at university in New York; but as she adds layer upon layer, we see it’s so much more complex than that.
Her tale begins with meeting – sort of – actor Gerard Butler; then she talks about her high school crush, the deliciousness of revenge, historical Supreme Court cases, US university hazing and the joys of taking part in Model United Nations at school.
Koch throws in some sharp political points too – former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell and convicted war criminal Slobodan Milosevic both get a name check – and there’s a neat joke about having attended more of her friends’ abortions than marriages, with the former, she reckons, having “a higher success rate”.
We wonder where all these disparate threads are leading, and it’s two-thirds of the way through before Koch starts the reveal, and where Fat Tom Cruise comes in. She recounts meeting a nerdy guy at a wedding and – of all the things he might have asked her to do – he invited her to attend a 10-year anniversary reunion of his college fraternity.
She shows how, deliberately or otherwise, we make ourselves the heroes of our stories – and how the narratives we construct about our lives may look very different depending which side of the looking glass you’re on.
And then there’s a terrific rug pull. It gives emotional heft and a powerful ending to a gag-filled show that has a heartfelt political – and personal – message at its centre.
