Sarah Hester Ross: Serving C*nt ★★★★★

Big voice, big personality, big opinions and an apparently inexhaustible supply of gloriously filthy material, Sarah Hester Ross’s Serving C*nt is cabaret with lashes (both eyes and tongue) to spare.

With north of three million online followers, Hester Ross establishes her credentials almost immediately. Sweeping on stage for the first of several musical numbers, her voice is genuinely fantastic, more than capable of delivering the musical goods beneath the comedy. And the songs themselves, most of which debuted on her TikTok channel, are very funny indeed, merrily careering through ageing, motherhood, misogyny, and the perennial scourge of internet trolls.

Between numbers, she is every bit as entertaining. Her frequent audience interactions are deliciously sharp but, crucially, never cruel. Hester Ross has the confidence of a performer who knows exactly how far she can push someone before pulling them back into the fun.

Beneath all the profanity and fabulousness, however, Serving C*nt has something more substantial on its mind. What initially appears to be an exercise in outrageous self-confidence gradually reveals itself as a celebration of female autonomy, ageing, self-acceptance and the right to take up space. Even the titular word is reclaimed as shorthand for living unapologetically and refusing to make yourself smaller for somebody else’s comfort.

There is, perhaps, one moment when the stilettos wobble. Like a growing number of contemporary comedy shows, Serving C*nt includes a section in which the laughter gives way to more earnest political commentary. The quibble is not the points being made, nor her decision to make them, but more one of integration rather than intent. The gear change is abrupt and, temporarily, it feels as though we have wandered into a different show. For a performer this accomplished, it could be argued that her polemic would work better emerging more organically from the material.

Hester Ross has no intention of leaving her audience on downer, however. By the time she launches into her plea to Stop Giving Men Microphones, the fabulousness is cranked back up.

And perhaps that’s ultimately why Serving C*nt works so well. For all its wilfully provocative packaging, there is something decidedly warm and generous at its heart. Hester Ross wants her audience, particularly the women in it, to leave feeling louder, stronger and considerably less inclined to apologise for themselves.