REVIEW: **** NASTY: 'big' girls being gross, mean and sexy - Succulent Theatre

Burdall’s Yard

May 26 [also runs May 27]

I am glad that the baked beans used on promo material for this show didn’t materialise. Cornflakes and squirty cream can make quite enough mess, thank you very much.

Succulent Theatre refer to what they do as Autobiographical Theatre. I’d go one step further: Confessional Theatre - the hint of salacious scandal suits it - the performers using real life experiences of their own to construct a litany of painful - but mostly also comic - experiences around food and sex. Many of their cultural references mean little to me - that’s OK, it’s not my generation - but, really, food and sex carry so much weight (pun irresistible) in everyone’s lives, you’d have to be particularly angelic or inert not to find something to connect with. Nasty is a good title, but doesn’t really describe show or content, and I think we’re all the happier for that. Nobody is exploiting anyone. Nobody is a voyeur. Nobody is excluded.

So far I may have made it sound like material for stand-up - which it would be, and it’s comedy that has made it possible to talk about these kind of topics without torturing the audience as well as the performers - but what makes it theatre is the degree of physical involvement - exercise, disco, eroticism - that the big girls have with their big stories. And, at one point, emotional involvement, that I don’t think was feigned.

We the audience also had our mild disgust triggers [the yeucchy kind, not the moral ones] tweaked. I’m wondering if a physical sensation like that hooks you into the action just as well as a ‘higher’ emotion; it works with kids and it might just work on adults too. As a piece it lacked anything but the roughest theatrical shape or character development, yes, but as addressing itself and its serious subjects directly to an audience of peers, there was nothing ‘theatrical’ (in the ‘exaggerated’ sense) about it either: knocked into shape, maybe, but nothing that felt contrived.

It was a strongly live performance. It exhibited energy and honesty and tried to say something about some big human topics. A bit of structured truth-telling on topics delicate and indelicate does everyone good.

Dr Zeno