Emily Harrison: This Never Happened
Arts Theatre, London

IT’S a year to the day since Emily Harrison was resident in a psychiatric institution. She’s marking the fact with this hour-long show which starts with her lipsyncing to Jennifer Hudson’s And I Am Telling You, which many will know as the song that Chi Chi DeVayne owned on series eight of Drag Race. As ever, Harrison serves up fabulous.

Voted best spoken-word performer of 2016, her show has plenty of poetry in it, much of it focusing on Harrison's experiences with mental health. Notably, she never puts herself forward, or backward, as a victim in a narrative that examines how she is presented as a “mental-health poet” — a female and working class one at that — and how she presents and brands herself as an individual rather than as a neat label.

“We edit the truth,” she says, and she makes an engaging, heartfelt and funny truth from all she is and has been through. Being a fastidious writer she knows full well what Aristotle writes in his Poetics: “The ridiculous consists in some form of error or ugliness that is not painful or injurious; the comic mask, for example, is distorted and ugly, but causes no pain.”