For a good ten minutes, it’s impossible to get a handle on this show. There are snippets of music, flashes of TV programmes on screens, and meanwhile Frankie Thompson and Liv Ello – both breakout performers from last year’s Fringe with individual shows – occasionally toss out fragments of phrases, Thompson in a ballerina outfit and Ello in a black suit. It’s like flicking through the weirdest, most demented Tiktok feed imaginable. Possibly during the apocalypse.
But as those images butt up against each other, some kind of bigger picture starts to emerge. This is a show about bodies (I guess the title is a bit of a clue) and the two performers’ conflicted relationship with their own, both in terms of disordered eating and gender identity.
There’s a lot of brilliantly quickfire video, edited by Thompson and Ello, featuring old adverts pushing awful gender stereotypes to show how far we’ve come, as well as clips of X Factor, Naked Attraction even Bake Off to show how far we haven’t.
Meanwhile in real life, rather than on screens, Thompson and Ello combine lip-syncing drag and scripted moments to confound ideas about how boys and girls, men and women are supposed to act and look. Two recurring images are Barbie – including life-size doll cases – and atom bombs exploding, leaning smartly into the wearying, gendered Barbenheimer discourse.
Essentially, dysmorphia and dysphoria are turned into a strange kaleidoscope of words and images, along with some brilliant comedy. For every Serious Thing, like a pretty gruesome clip of Andrew Tate bestowing his thoughts on masculinity, there’s plenty of low culture daftness, like a routine where the Last Supper – ‘Dear God’ – is intercut with Come Dine With Me – ‘what a sad little life, Jane’.
A sudden swerve towards sincerity in the show’s later moments makes the point far less powerfully than in the earlier, sillier stuff and that tonal shift is a smaller part of a bigger qualm: even as the big themes emerge, the show never really settles. There’s no structure here, just montage. Maybe that’s the point: it’s a show about confusion that turns that theme into its structure, unsettled, uncertain and shifting. Either way, it makes for a show which, as it serves up its full-bodied For You page, is brilliant in many of its moments, but doesn’t always cohere.
