Review: A Perfectly Normal Show at The Grosvenor Hotel

A Perfectly Normal Show at The Grosvenor Hotel
Saturday, January 24, 2026

From the moment we shuffled into the makeshift, repurposed space hosting A Perfectly Normal Show, it was clear this wasn’t going to behave like theatre-as-usual. A back room at the Grosvenor felt less like a stage and more like a family setup—intimate, improvised, domestic. A migrant garden of signifiers quietly placed us somewhere specific yet slippery: not realism, not parody, but something familiar and lovingly absurd.

The lo-fi production was disarmingly upfront. The Rassputin Wet Posse duo ran their own sound, delivered their own intro, and repeated the mantra—“a perfectly normal heterosexual couple”—until it became both punchline and incantation. Normality, here, was something to be stretched, glittered, stripped, and gently broken open.

Enter Nonno and Nonne. Nonno (played by Rassputin), diminutive and coy, dug in the garden wearing glittered garms that spoke of day labour as much as drag eccentricity. Lucy Furr’s Nonne hunched over to wash clothes by hand, anchored firmly in gendered domestic labour. Then, with gleeful timing, both stripped—Nonno flashing a cheeky bare arse (not for the last time that night), the intimacy between them tender rather than crude. When Nonne slung Nonno over their shoulder and carried him offstage, strength and softness swapped places without comment or apology.

The narrative zigzagged through a fictionalised migrant love story past—somewhere near “Slavia, 1962”, a stone’s throw from Transylvania (hint, hint). Less a location than a mood, the Eastern Bloc setting served as a shorthand where survival scripts were handed down alongside recipes and gender roles: a “perfectly normal heterosexual cookbook”, desirable thighs that could crush a pumpkin, and missed dates at Nando’s soundtracked to Fernando. A “man” was sought in the mailroom. Bears were wrestled during hiking expeditions in enormous Slavian drag boots. It was silly, yes—but never empty.

Costume changes came thick and fast—well, at least for garment-whore Nonno. He emerged in a Euro-trash silk shirt and sock suspenders, lip-syncing to Italo disco, before donning hot-pink sweatbands and 80s aerobics energy for a pivot between I’m Just Ken and Dua Lipa. Aldi became a recurring sacred text—north versus south à la the Berlin Wall divide, irresistible Special Buys, and bedazzled shopping bags sparkling with consumer devotion.

What made it all land wasn’t the jokes alone, but the banter—that familiar, affectionate nonsense of older migrant couples mishearing each other, clarifying requests, and arguing over bath soaks versus bath socks. The audience recognised it. We’d heard these rhythms before.

As the show edged towards the personal—with Nonno revealing himself as a trans man, legally still a woman in the UK, with a pointed nod to J. K. Rowling—the room only softened with more affection. They spoke of not having children but of adopting audiences instead. Drag as chosen family. Performance as inheritance.

Gritty, lo-fi, and gloriously unpolished, A Perfectly Normal Show reminded us what drag looked like before Botox budgets and algorithmic sheen—when it was scrappy, political, horny, loving, and deeply human. Normal? Not for a second. Perfect? Almost.

CAT LANDRO