Nat Luurtsema: Here She Be

One of comedy's power couples and two-thirds of sketch juggernauts Jigsaw, Tom Craine and Nat Luurtsema were doing fine until they recently split up. Now both Tom and Nat are each doing solo shows about the seperation and its aftermath.

We live in a world where Katie Price has made a career from telling gossip mags about her breakups so this could be construed as being cynical, but a few minutes of listening to Luurtsema's side of the story confirms that it's nothing of the sort. She starts with a rundown of everything that's terrible about Tom and why no one should ever sleep with him. It's done in a lighthearted way, but there's a real sense of hurt and loss underpinning all of it.

That conflict runs thourghout the show and is what makes it so funny and fascinating. Luurtsema is a genial crowdpleaser by nature, but she can't help inserting bitchy Jo Caulfield-esque asides about everyone and everything. The best parts are her tales of life after the breakup: living with her parents again and being horribly infantalised, getting chatted up by dorky 21-year-olds and a disasterous attempt at casual sex on holiday. All of these stories are told in a flashy, funny, Saturday-night-headliner style, but underpinned with a real sadness. Whether this is theraputic for her is debatable, but the show itself works. Onstage at least, the single life really seems to suit Luurtsema.