Finally, A Westlife Show We Can Enjoy: Bubblewrap, Reviewed

Sofie Hagen's confessional outpouring Bubblewrap begins with an outpouring of another kind. We join the Danish comic in a hotel bathroom, crouched over a bloke in a shower, about to do her business over him. From this tantalising-if-icky starting point, Hagen gushes forth about life as a messed-up teen and how it all came to this.

The road to the ignominious shower scene, it turns out, was paved with horse theft and self-harming. But Hagen's cardinal sin was falling maniacally in love with milk-and-water boy band Westlife — putting in desperately random long-distance calls from Denmark to Dublin, and penning erotic fan fiction about Nicky and Shane in which they have logistically dubious sex that could only be dreamed up by a 13 year old who's also The World's Biggest Westlife Fan.

Bubblewrap goes to some pretty extreme places, including a psychiatric hospital, but there's something in Hagen's breezy manner, and self-defacing descriptions of adolescent screwiness we can all relate to. As she reads extracts from her teenage oeuvre, in which she hurls herself into a river "a mile deep" before Nicky rescues her, reassuring her that he like girls with "big tits on the inside", it's easy to see why Bubblewrap won such plaudits at Edinburgh.

Bubblewrap by Sofie Hagen is on at Soho Theatre, 21 Dean Street, W1D 3NE until 6 January (although not every day — check dates). Tickets £15 (concessions £12.50). Londonist saw this show on a complimentary ticket.