Intrepid Theatre

‘A Car Crash’ is a show that is really a car crash – or a car crash that is really a show. It’s been almost exactly five years since Louie Lang Norman performed his last autobiographical solo show. ‘hold fast; soft crash.’ It was a show about queerness, rural isolation, mental illness and the musical magic of Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again – or at least, he thought it was at the time.

Five years later and his most recent artistic creation – locally tolerated drag queen Ket Bush – is here to help him revisit the very show that accidentally documented his slippage into drug addiction.

Part drag show, part confession, and part re-enactment, ‘A Car Crash’ is a live art and theatre experiment about staging real life. Autobiographical, intimate and intense, the show asks one question of its audience throughout: do you believe me?

This is the first work-in-progress showing of ‘A Car Crash,’ developed during Intrepid Theatre’s 2024 OUTstages Artist-in-Residence programme. ‘A Car Crash’ includes excerpts of ‘hold fast; soft crash,’ developed 2018-2019 with support from the Exeter Phoenix, Camden People’s Theatre, Natalie McGrath, Shamaya Carvajal, Sachal Khan and Maz Murray.

Accessibility

Sensory warnings: There are no sensory warnings for this show

Content warnings: Adult language, sexual content, drugs/alcohol use, themes of self-harm and mental illness, partial nudity

Please indicate any accessibility needs, including wheelchair accessible seating or if you require seating with no stairs, in the provided field. We will do our best to assign seating that works for you and get in touch if we have any questions.

We have a venue visual guide for this performance, and is updated as of December 2024. You can look at the venue here.

Credits

Created and performed by: Louie Lang Norman/Ket Bush

About the artists

Louie Lang Norman is a performance and drag artist based in ‘Victoria’ BC and is Intrepid Theatre’s 2024 Artist-in-Residence. Louie began his artistic career in the mid 2010’s in London (UK)’s live art and experimental cabaret scenes; from electrocuting himself in the name of poetry, to a 6-hour long fan/tribute performance in a sex dungeon-cum-Kate Bush shrine, Louie tends to be drawn to making art with a poetics of excess that helps to make a spectacle out of the performances we do every day in real life. Louie has presented solo shows and performance installations at international performance festivals in Europe (DISKURS 2018, Germany / SPILL Festival of Performance 2018, UK / INKONST 2019, Sweden / Come As You Are 2019, UK), and was a finalist for Unlimited’s Main Commission Award in 2020. Louie has presented his research on Fan Theatre at universities in the UK, US and Canada, and his forthcoming scholarly chapter on fan performances is anthologised in Theatre Fandom, University of Iowa Press (2025).

After taking a hiatus from creative practice from 2020-2022, Louie returned to the arts with his newest creation: locally tolerated drag queen Ket Bush. Ket has performed in a couple cities in the UK, but is mostly known for terrorizing local Victorians with her unabashed and disturbed affinity for baked beans and horses (when she’s not doing an all-ages drag brunch, that is…). Ket won the Vicious Poodle Pageant in 2022, produced the ‘Stupid Sessions’ show series at Friends of Dorothy in 2023, and is a founding member of Victoria-based drag/theatre production collective Drag in Concept.

Tickets for this performance are by donation, in increments of $5, $10, $15, and $20.

Arrival at the venue: The doors will open  30 minutes ahead of showtime.  Masks are strongly encouraged inside the theatre.

Refunds: If you are not feeling well or have any symptoms, please stay home to help keep everyone safe. We are able to discuss refunds on a case by case basis due to health reasons before the performance. Please contact tickets@intrepidtheatre.com. We are unable to arrange refunds after a performance has occurred.