WENCH – Underbelly ★★★★

Some shows arrive at the Fringe as finished products. Others arrive with the thrilling sense that they are still becoming. WENCH belongs firmly in the second category. There are rough edges still visible, connective tissue that could be strengthened and ideas that occasionally race ahead of their execution. Yet it is precisely that sense of creative restlessness that makes the evening so compelling. More surprisingly, it is being performed to audiences far smaller than it deserves. Created and performed by Drag Idol UK winner Felix Le Freak, WENCH initially presents itself as the story of Martha Tallow, a seventeenth-century woman accused of witchcraft in an England eager to find someone to blame. Yet she is only the first incarnation of a much larger idea. Across the evening we encounter a languid Weimar-era German chanteuse and, later, a 1990s celebrity who seems to have emerged from an improbable collision between Madonna’s self-mythologising and Amy Winehouse’s bruised Cockney…