BOY PARTS at Soho Theatre

★★★★

“it’s wittier and more playful, equal parts cheerful and chilling.”

This sizzling one woman show adapted from Eliza Clark’s acclaimed novel is provocative and powerful and deeply sinister.

The play follows Irina (Aimée Kelly), a Newcastle based fetish photographer who is exploring the subversion of the male gaze in her work. After a London gallery requests something more hardcore, her work becomes increasingly violent. She begins blurring lines of consent, and increasingly of reality.

We are immersed into the story from the off. The audience are greeted with business cards, the curtain has projections of gallery description labels, we have been invited to an exhibition opening. Peter Butler’s set design sees the stage left bare, except for one stool and one thin gauze screen. And one performer. Sara Joyce’s simple and intimate direction works strikingly well throughout, a particular moment stands out where Kelly sits down on the edge of the stage, swinging her legs into the stalls, and addressing the audience directly and frankly.

Gillian Greer’s adaptation is direct and sparse. The story has been streamlined, and simplified, which works well. It does lose some of the claustrophobic skin crawling horror of the novel. Instead, it’s wittier and more playful, equal parts cheerful and chilling.

Joyce’s direction sees a mix of live performance with video elements designed by Hayley Egan. This allows Joyce to play with time and space, but also employs effects to startle and discomfort the audience.

“This is the kind of urgent, provocative theatre that Soho Theatre does best”

Kelly’s performance is compelling and intense. She multi-roles, throwing herself into every character with passion and focus. She is also heavily pregnant, something which is rare to see on stage, but is an important step in the fight for pregnant actors’ rights. It is a physical performance, and one which explores the body and sex, and it’s fascinating how quickly we forget her pregnancy, and focus on the performance. It is a really impressive feat.

The sound (Tom Foskett-Barnes) and lighting (Christopher Nairne) designs are contemporary and raw. Playing into the exploration of photography and visual mediums there is multimedia – projections of long exposure photography, layered film, letters, flashing images, words and text messages. Flickering lights, pulsing beats, prolonged projections of brightly coloured screens – all of these combine to build audience discomfort, along with the startling subject matter.

Parts of the play feels a little literal, a bit on the nose. Everything does tie up but some moments are a bit disjointed, maybe a little rushed. While the messaging of the play is perhaps too spelled out, the ideas are fascinating. How far must Irina go to be taken seriously as a threat?

This is the kind of urgent, provocative theatre that Soho Theatre does best. The adaptation feels as fresh and almost as shocking as the novel, while also being funny.

BOY PARTS at Soho Theatre

Reviewed on 23rd October 2023

by Auriol Reddaway

Photography by Joe Twigg

Previously reviewed at this venue:

Brown Boys Swim | ★★★★★ | October 2023

Strategic Love Play | ★★★★★ | September 2023

Kate | ★★★★★ | September 2023

Eve: All About Her | ★★★★★ | August 2023

String V Spitta | ★★★★ | August 2023

Bloody Elle | ★★★★★ | July 2023

Peter Smith’s Diana | ★ | July 2023

Britanick | ★★★★★ | February 2023

Le Gateau Chocolat: A Night at the Musicals | ★★★★ | January 2023

Welcome Home | ★★★★ | January 2023

Boy Parts

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★★★★

“at an unsettling, anxiety-inducing pitch, the play takes us to the darkest corners of our society”

In small town America, Sam (Michelle Fox) and her husband John (Mark Quartley) have a thing for guns. ‘Thing’ as in obsession: they can’t leave the house or sleep without one. ‘Thing’ also as in fetish: the cold steel plays a prominent role in their sex life. Sam was kidnapped when she was thirteen. Someone with a gun rescued her. Guns are her comfort and her safety.

But one night, John accidentally shoots Sam in the arm during a sex game, and they decide to cut guns out of their lives completely. This is easier said than done when Sam’s brother Scotty (Nima Taleghani) comes to stay with a full arsenal, and the news reports a local girl, Jessica, has been kidnapped. All of Sam’s unresolved emotions come flooding back. Under the pressure, cracks spread through Sam and John’s marriage, Sam’s mental stability, and their gun-abstinence pact.

Far from being simple gun control propaganda, Sarah Kosar’s Armadillo is bold enough to delve into an issue most of us want to see as black and white. At an unsettling, anxiety-inducing pitch, the play takes us to the darkest corners of our society: where young girls are kidnapped, sexually abused, and murdered. Where even the staunchest anti-gun activists might catch themselves thinking, ‘if I’d had a gun…’

The design team submerges us into the nightmare, creating a paranoid fever-dream of flashing neon lights and pulsing, hallucinatory blackouts (Jessica Hung Han Yun), sharp sounds (Anna Clock), and disrupted media projections (Ash J Woodward). Like ticking bombs, the constant, ominous presence of guns keeps the audience on edge throughout the ninety minutes. Stuffed in couch cushions, under pillows, in the freezer, firearms are littered throughout Jasmine Swan’s clever, intriguing set. Raised platforms display a deconstructed house (a mattress, a toilet), encircled by calf-deep water.

Kosar impressively interrogates the complexity of Sam’s trauma as she struggles with whether she’s justified in being as damaged as she is. “Nothing really even happened!” people love telling her, since her kidnapper threatened but never touched her. However, John and Scotty are noticeably shallower characters. The dialogue between the three of them is uneven, awkward, and unnatural, which carries over into Fox, Quartley, and Taleghani’s delivery. It may be a stylistic choice by Kosar and director Sara Joyce as part of the uncomfortable, surreal aesthetic, but the stilted lines prevent the characters (even Sam) from feeling like real people, which makes them difficult to connect with.

There’s plenty of sharp observation in the play’s themes of addiction, enabling (and the guilt that motivates it), coping with trauma, toxic relationships, fetishising violence, and self-destructive behaviour. Armadillos famously jump when scared, which often results in them being hit by cars that would have harmlessly passed over them. Their defence ironically puts them in more danger. It’s a shrewd analogy for the way Americans reach for automatic weapons in search of safety.

Reviewed by Addison Waite

Photography by Maurizio Martorana

BOY PARTS at Soho Theatre

★★★★

“it’s wittier and more playful, equal parts cheerful and chilling.”

“This is the kind of urgent, provocative theatre that Soho Theatre does best”

BOY PARTS at Soho Theatre

Reviewed on 23rd October 2023

by Auriol Reddaway

Photography by Joe Twigg

Previously reviewed at this venue:

Boy Parts

Boy Parts

The Yard Theatre

Reviewed – 5th June 2019

★★★★

“at an unsettling, anxiety-inducing pitch, the play takes us to the darkest corners of our society”

Reviewed by Addison Waite

Photography by Maurizio Martorana

Armadillo

The Yard Theatre until 22nd June

Previously reviewed at this venue: