Theatre / Diana The Untold and Untrue Story. The Street Theatre, March 27. Reviewed by ALANNA MACLEAN.

It played one night only in Canberra, but what a hoot Diana The Untold and Untrue Story was.

The audience was warmed up by a lively traditional drag segment from Pixie Polite from RuPaul’s Drag Race UK.  Then in the second half Linus Karp arrived as an absolutely splendid Diana and another dimension to gender impersonation was revealed.

This Diana story contained the lot, from birth to a sidestepping of Diana’s death that managed to implicate the Queen. Heaven and Mother Teresa got in the act and there was much use of clever multimedia. As well, members of the audience were hauled in to perform. Diana’s conception, her parents and the ongoing presence of her dad were done that way as was a brief appearance by a corgi.

Charles was a gormless cardboard cutout and Camilla was an incoherent flailing puppet dressed in marriage-wrecking red and brought to exuberant life by fellow performer Joseph Martin. While Karp held the stage as Diana, Martin, dour faced in a black kilt, created Camilla as a marvellous demon.

The wedding got a whole section to itself with a recreation of the dress that was more about the enormous trailing veil, passed around the auditorium by the audience. The birth of the boys were puppet dolls that dropped out from under Diana’s skirts, the second with red hair. The costume changes were spectacular evocations of Diana’s wardrobe and not even a misbehaving wig could mute Karp’s sensitive charting of her evolution.

Karp’s performance celebrated her support for gays in the midst of the AIDS crisis as well as brushing against the sadness of her death with little references to Candle in the Wind. Elton John at that funeral was not far away.

A great glimpse of the riches often to be found at the Adelaide Fringe.