I was mentally prepared to cut Goddess Wanted: Must Provide Own Pedestal a break. There’s always a moment in an out of the way show that gives them a fair review, a genuinely funny moment that you can use to salvage something from a show you can muster no enthusiasm for. But when you’re begging for the end and they give you an interval, you lose whatever hope you had.

What.

Ever.

Then they made it worse. See, there’s a rule in the theatre game (and this is theatre, folks. Props, lighting and scene changes. Theatre.) Actors don’t come out for a quick pint with the audience until after the show. It’s Just Not Done. In a show this genuinely terrible, you’d expect the crew to be commiserating over a couple of heavies during the God-awful 15 minutes of waiting, but the actors stay in the space ’til it’s done. It’s called professionalism, people.

I feel better now.

Let’s talk about the triumph of mediocrity. Goddess Wanted has its heart in exactly the right place. One of the great things about comedy, and the Festival, is the place it gives women to speak in their own voices about themselves, and about the world in which they live – things like body fascism, and the pressure work and home and family exert even when they’re not what you have chosen. I suspect the loosely connected vignettes of Goddess Wanted may have referred to those.