Gwyneth Paltrow versus optometrist Terry Sanderson: the truth is funnier than fiction

Gwyneth Goes Skiing
at the North Wall Arts Centre, Oxford
on Thursday, October 17 and Friday 18

Review by JON LEWIS

Courting Fame

Linus Karp and Joseph Martin’s queer comedy Gwyneth Goes Skiing takes a wry dig at celebrity culture by satirising the ski-slope accident and subsequent law case between American actress and Goop business owner Gwyneth Paltrow and an elderly, wealthy optometrist, Terry Sanderson. The show uses testimony verbatim from the case, quoting both parties faithfully, mainly because the truth is often funnier than any fiction.

The first half delves into the characters and the accident which took place in Deer Valley, Utah in 2016. Karp, with a long blonde wig, has a talent for demure, simpering glances, demonstrating how his version of Paltrow affects an imposing sincerity for a grateful public. Martin’s Sanderson is a gruff, overconfident nobody who now has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be noticed.

A two-hander, much of the comedy relies on selecting the most appropriate members of the audience to play a range of supporting characters. They join the duo on stage, reading their lines from a screen, with perhaps the most important role being that of Gwyneth’s “boyfriend and future husband” Brad Falchuk.

Her child, Apple, with Chris Martin from the band Cold Play, is represented throughout the comedy as an apple, her words heard by chomping sound effects over the speakers.

Paltrow’s more bizarre Goop product lines are already self-satirising but form a constant target for mockery. The duo are confident comedians with a sure and knowing style. The jokes at the expense of Paltrow’s UK film Sliding Doors fall flat though because many in the audience are too young to have seen it.

After the interval the setting is the courtroom, the unseen judge spoken in voiceover. Martin gets his chance to be very silly, holding a Muppet-like puppet of Sanderson’s celebrity-fawning attorney whose main lines of enquiry involve sucking up to Paltrow.

Paltrow plays up to her powerful position within Hollywood and business by showering witnesses and the opposing attorney, with Goop gift bags.

We all then get to vote via a QR code that we scan from an onstage screen, choosing who wins the case.

There are rapturous cheers at the finale.