‘It’s divisive.” Well, you’d think so, a “kink performance art” clown show with nudity, bodily fluids, worms and, er, Gwyneth Paltrow. And yet Primal Bog left last year’s Edinburgh fringe with praise ringing in the ears of its creator Rosa Garland. To the degree that Garland is a winning and fearlessly provocative performer, I’m happy to join the chorus. But – hey, it’s divisive – I didn’t find the show as thrilling as some in the audience. A gross-out address to queerness and carnality, it’s vivid in its image-making, cheerfully elusive when it comes to making sense – and more inclined to celebrate than offer insight into misbehaving bodies and idiosyncratic desire.
Garland shows her hand from the opening moments, urinating into a vase, then smearing herself head-to-toe in orange gunge. This she does in the supposed persona of Paltrow, proprietor of “wellness brand” Goop – against whose airbrushed vision of feminine grace the show styles itself. Here is Garland with slime dripping from chin, her breasts, the tip of her nose. Here she is thrusting into a folding chair, or making out with an earthworm. In another set piece, she narrates a dream about joining a community of masochists in their mountain hideaway.
I craved a little more clarity and coherence, as this reverie gave way to a sequence in which our host itemises her desires while prostrate on the floor (sightlines are a problem) in counterpoint to abstract shards of video on an upstage screen. Elsewhere, as Garland is given a tattoo live on stage while we watch film of a man canoeing, the diverting oddity and charm of the spectacle just – but only just – keeps the patience from fraying. Garland has an engagingly artless manner as she navigates not over, not under, but through (Michael Rosen makes an appearance) all this gunk, dirt and oozing carnality – interests her show shares with another delinquent Edfringe 25 hit, Creepy Boys’ Slugs. It’s nonconformist and not a comfortable watch, positing in Garland’s psychosexual imaginings a more real and wilder world than is dreamed of in Paltrow’s philosophy.
• At Soho theatre, London, until 7 March
