Queer joy, or 'brainrot' theatre? The rise and rise of pop-culture parody
Linus Karp and Joseph Martin on their viral hits about Princess Diana and Gwyneth Paltrow... and why they're getting married onstage
Hello, and welcome to our Friday piece, where Joshua Taylor interviews Awkward Productions about their pop-culture parodies for the chronically online, how ‘queer theatre’ is hitting its stride, and why they love the Edinburgh Fringe so much they’re getting hitched there. But first – a few lines from out generous sponsor of this week’s post! (If you’d like to feature in this space, do check out our advertising info here.)
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‘Getting married on stage reflects the camp “out-there” side of us’
By Joshua Taylor
The first time I met Linus Karp and Joseph Martin of Awkward Productions, if you can call it ‘meeting’, was at a performance of Diana: The Untold and Untrue Story in April 2024. After an uncharacteristically bold decision to sit at the front of the King's Head Theatre, I was asked by Martin if I would play Diana’s dad. I agreed: unaware that this meant, in five minutes time, I would be opening the show by performing post-coital dialogue with a stranger playing Diana’s mum. This was only forgiven because I got to walk ‘Diana’ down the aisle later in the show (and because it means I share a theatre credit with Sebastian Croft).
It is through this kind of queerly ordained chaos that Karp and Martin’s shows have garnered quite the reputation. Karp and Martin – who are a romantic couple as well as creatives partners – co-founded Awkward Prods in 2017, driven by Karp’s desire to play roles in which he would otherwise not be cast. A successful pre-Covid production of Rob Hayes’ Awkward Conversations With Animals I Have F*cked led the couple to write their own material, which began with How to Live a Jellicle Life: Life Lessons Learned from the 2019 Hit Movie Musical ‘Cats’. The show was taken to the 2022 and 2023 Edinburgh Fringes before they developed their current roster of Diana: The Untold and Untrue Story and Gwyneth Goes Skiing, both of which have been to the Fringe, and on international tours, including to the Swedish-born Karp’s homeland. The latter – a spoof retelling of Gwyneth Paltrow’s ski trial (although an alarmingly high proportion is verbatim) – achieved particular viral success. Paltrow herself famously remarked “I try not to engage much in that kind of stuff” when asked about the show in an interview.
When I interview them, the pair are fresh from a global tour of Diana: The Untold and Untrue Story, a high camp, slightly-less-than-factual retelling of the life and times of Princess Diana (to give just one, telling example of their minor deviation from the truth, in this version, Princess Di invents PrEP). Basing a show on such an internationally iconic figure meant that the tour could go ahead with minimal changes to the script, whether they were performing in Bangkok or Belfast. As Karp notes, “Diana is universal: she is beloved and legendary the world over, so whilst it’s a very British show, it’s a type of culture and history that everyone knows about.” The one thing they did change? A brief cameo from Captain Sir Tom Moore was substituted for Mother Teresa, voiced by Rob Madge. Obviously.
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