Fringe review: Millicent Sarre is Too Tired to Smash (Patriarchy)
Funny, furious and deeply humane, Millicent Sarre’s new cabaret reframes burnout as a feminist and social justice issue, blending razor-sharp comedy, original music and compassionate insight into the numbing grind of modern life. ★★★★★
Millicent Sarre is Too Tired to Smash (Patriarchy) is the third show in Sarre’s award-winning feminist comedy cabaret triptych (following Friendly Feminism and Opinionated). Yet this superb performance stands on its own feet. This is a show about burnout – not as personal failure but as a feminist and social justice issue generated by systems that exhaust our nervous systems and then shame us for collapsing under their weight.
Sarre opens with a jaw-dropping number that immediately establishes both her lyrical brilliance and vocal chops. Using a loop pedal to build a lush, multi-layered sound, she sings about her “higher self” and the raft of impossible expectations she can never quite meet. The song is hilarious, razor-sharp, and disarmingly self-deprecating, its observational detail landing punchline after punchline while quietly naming the structural forces underpinning her insights.
That blend of comedy and analysis is the show’s spine. Sarre’s lyrics are densely packed with insight – about gender roles, ethical consumption in late-stage capitalism, the onslaught of geo-political horrors – and yet the humour never feels laboured or didactic.
After the opening number she brings her partner (Cameron Nicholls) onstage to help build a literal Venn diagram of modern burnout: global catastrophes, technological overload, patriarchal gender norms, the pressures of ethical consumerism and gifted-child perfectionism. The moment perfectly encapsulates Sarre’s approach – insightful, hilarious and delivered with panache.
Musically, the show gradually shifts in tone as Sarre’s argument about burnout progresses. Her ‘Existential crisis in B major’ skewers society’s vanishing tolerance for nuance; a buoyant palette-cleanser about finding a life partner behind a dating-app paywall delivers laughs; a country-tinged number tackles the final frontier of feminism – the invisible labour and emotional administration still disproportionately carried by women.
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Then the tone deepens. Sarre returns to the loop pedal for a haunting meditation on technology, algorithms, and compassion fatigue: how constant exposure to tragedy numbs us into apathy, a state that ultimately benefits those in power. From there, ‘Too Sensitive for This World’ articulates a disturbing truth – that our nervous systems were never designed to cope with this scale of horror.
But as Sarre enters the final stretch, she offers us her conclusion to all this hard-won analysis. By reframing self-care as a form of resistance, Sarre insists that tending to ourselves is how we stay battle-ready. Her closing song, quietly defiant, leaves the audience buoyed with hope.
With a knockout voice and a steel-trap mind, Millicent Sarre has created a show that is compassionate, hilarious, and bracingly intelligent. She yanks back the covers to expose the systems that keep us exhausted and powerless, then sends us out into the world smiling – and thinking.
Millicent Sarre is Too Tired to Smash (Patriarchy) is playing at the Kingfisher at Gluttony from February 24 – 28 and March 1
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