One party claimed “permanent traumatic brain injury, four broken ribs [and] loss of enjoyment of life”. The other “lost half a day of skiing”. Now the unconscious coupling of Gwyneth Paltrow and Terry Sanderson, who collided on a ski slope and faced off last year in a notorious trial, slaloms on to the stage. That should not be taken to suggest that Linus Karp and Joseph Martin – AKA Awkward Productions – have identified beneath all the privilege, idiocy and razzmatazz any wider implications or deeper dramatic currents. They have not. They’re here for the idiocy and razzmatazz, and so, dear viewer, must you be.
Karp himself, fresh from performing as Princess Di in Diana: The Untold and Untrue Story, stars as Paltrow: serene, superior, and – Karp being Swedish – sing-song Scandinavian. Martin is the septuagenarian optometrist who ploughs into her – or was it vice versa? – on the piste. The show has them meeting in the Deer Valley, Utah resort before the accident in question, ramping up the contrast between Sanderson’s “sad” life and Gwyneth’s glamorous one. It ramps up everything else, too: this is a camp cartoon, delighted by the affair’s every instance of shallowness, star-worship and bad faith.
