Comedian aims to champion women

NATALIE CUTLER

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COMEDIAN and actress Natalie Cutler is a smart, funny mix of contradictions.

She's a former model and beauty pageant contestant, a former Miss Birmingham and Miss England finalist, has travelled the world on the beauty circuit and her partner is a Wolves football star ­- so technically you might even think of her as a WAG. Though if you read on you will probably realise you shouldn't do so to her face.

And she has this high-pitched voice with a slight Black Country twang that you know gets her treated condescendingly by people who don't know her ("I'm making a conscious effort to lower the tone of my voice as we speak", she jokes self-deprecatingly).

Champion

And yet when she comes to Oldham Coliseum this Saturday night, her one-woman show ­- part theatre, part stand-up comedy ­- is unexpectedly a mildly feminist entertainment about the cause of women from the Suffragette period to today.

Though Natalie doesn't particularly enjoy calling herself a feminist: in "Not Yet Suffragette" it's shorthand for how she prefers to think of herself, as a "champion of women".

Regardless of how it looks or how she looks, however she thinks of herself and whatever term she uses, Natalie (27) isn't kidding about comedy. In fact she's pretty serious about everything she attempts.

She was a model and beauty queen who wanted to be an actress, so went to her local Birmingham acting school and later worked around the world in theatre shows for the Disney company. More recently she wanted to return to acting and spent three months in New York as an intern at the world-famous Actors Studio.

The one-woman show is thus the result of a five-minute acting-class piece she took to local comedy clubs ­- before adding another 55 minutes, presenting it at last year's Brighton Festival and ending up with five-star reviews. Festival judges even named her one of their top five picks (out of 900 starters), which was pretty good going for a first attempt.

Even more recently she has become interested in film . . . and her first fly-on-the-wall documentary "Not in Vain", about beauty pageants and contestants, was premiered in a Birmingham cinema a few days ago.

"People say you can't be a feminist and be in beauty pageants, but in almost every case the participants are using the beauty world as a springboard to other, bigger things, which is great," she says.

Her performance at the Coliseum comes courtesy of associate director Chris Lawson, who saw it in Brighton and has since helped her work on it. The show has already won her an accolade as one of Brum's top five up and coming comedians.

"The show is about stuff I wanted to say," she explains. "My thoughts on being a woman; stuff about baby showers, marriage and children; all the things women are supposed to want and the looks you get when people hear you might not; that sort of thing.

Offbeat

"But I'm not a man-hating feminist; everything is taken from a comic viewpoint and I think it's funny to look at certain female traditions more logically."

Natalie also talks about gender inequality, again in a slightly offbeat way: "It makes me laugh that women literally put their own life on the line to give birth," she says. "They suffer for nine months, put their career on hold, then... name the child after a man!

"Logic would suggest you name an achievement after the one who put in all the work. But women don't think like this - which is one reason why I wanted to create the show. Hopefully it will give my fellow females food for thought."

The show gallops through women's issues over the decades and as far as Natalie is concerned is the start of a second successful career. "I thought I'd be up for my second Oscar by now," she laughed. "But I've had an invite to do the show in New York, so it's a promising start."