{"id":366518,"date":"2025-08-23T05:56:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-23T05:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/366518\/"},"modified":"2025-08-23T05:56:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-23T05:56:10","slug":"katie-norris-go-west-old-maid-review-unhinged-comedy-from-the-cool-governess-to-gen-z-edinburgh-festival-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/366518\/","title":{"rendered":"Katie Norris: Go West, Old Maid review \u2013 unhinged comedy from the \u2018cool governess\u2019 to gen Z | Edinburgh festival 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since childhood, Katie Norris has been called an \u201cold soul\u201d \u2013 which won\u2019t surprise anyone who saw her solo debut<\/a> Farm Fatale, a gothic melodrama in character as a Miss Havisham-like spinster, crazy for cats. Something of that remains in Go West, Old Maid, where we meet again the gen Z flatmates to whom Norris plays \u201ccool governess\u201d. But it\u2019s worn more lightly here, put on for laughs to startle us, and slipped out of when \u2013 the thrust of the show, this \u2013 she wants to talk about her late dad, a plummy thespian dispensing useless advice to Katie across not so much a generation gap as a chasm.<\/p>\n

That gives Norris the only excuse she needs to open with a withering takedown of \u201cold dads\u201d, and an enjoyable fantasy of herself becoming a mum in her 80s. She has great fun with her predilection for man-crushing here, notably in a song, about being a godmother that imagines her exes turned into toads at the bottom of her garden. An even finer number conjures her father\u2019s nostalgia for his theatrical golden age \u2013 and by that stage, the song is amusing and tender in equal measure, because we have heard he went to a brutal boarding school with Boris Johnson\u2019s dad, and so he has our deepest sympathy.<\/p>\n

In between, some asides about Norris\u2019s secretive mum (raising so many questions as to almost knock the dead-dad show off its axis), a routine about her personal trainer, and a show-and-tell about her new taxidermy habit. Cumulatively, Go West, Old Maid doesn\u2019t make quite the impact of Farm Fatale: there\u2019s something anticlimactic about its dramatic shape, and the act-out of her father\u2019s supposed play script feels like a generic nugget of audience participation.<\/p>\n

But at her best, for most of this show, Norris isn\u2019t generic in the slightest. She has developed such a distinctive and diverting persona: threatening (but just for fun), eccentric and proud of it in her \u201cVictorian bellboy\u201d outfit, apt at any moment to drop an unhinged aside or out-of-the-blue song \u2013 like the cracker here celebrating the missionary position. \u201cOld soul\u201d, she may be, but Norris\u2019s act is in glorious full bloom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since childhood, Katie Norris has been called an \u201cold soul\u201d \u2013 which won\u2019t surprise anyone who saw her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":366519,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[77,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-366518","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115076542254699844","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366518\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/366519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}