Ria Lina Brings Fire and Fearless Laughter to Much Wenlock.
A Valentine’s night crowd packed into The Edge Arts Centre on Saturday to welcome back Ria Lina with her latest tour show Riabellion, and she rewarded them with a powerful, precision-tooled routine that proved both thought-provoking and uproariously funny. Clearly delighted that so many chose sharp satire over candlelit dinners, Lina wasted no time in unleashing a relentless stream of invective riddled with punchlines. Her material, which touched knowingly on politics and the state of the world, was pitched perfectly for the appreciative audience, who roared along from the outset.
Lina’s brilliance lies in her ability to balance intellectual bite with gloriously human confession. From navigating perimenopause to the domestic arrangement of living with her ex-husband a decade after divorce, nothing was off limits. She skewered the perils of wide age gaps in relationships – even gently interrogating a couple in the audience who admitted to 17 years between them – and delivered a hilarious riff at the expense of a man returning to the theatre from the bathroom mid-show. Yet there was warmth, too: open curiosity about Much Wenlock itself, its historic buildings and the people who fill them, gave the evening a genuine personal touch.
The evening was opened by Reb Day, who quickly won over the audience with her sharply observed set about how life at an all-girls’ school and a formative crush on the spider from A Bug’s Life had impacted on her developing sexuality. By the time Ria Lina took to the stage for the main event, the audience was more than ready. Fearless, provocative and delivered at a mile a minute, Riabellion confirmed that Ria Lina is very much in command, and Much Wenlock was more than happy to join the uprising.
Dynamic photo by Andy Brooks