Showing as a livestream production on Zoom during the Living Record Festival, Becky Fury’s one-person show C*nt was my wild card choice.
Billed as “partly an irreverent, illustrated history of the c-word and partly just an excuse to indulge in the simple joy of calling people c*nts”, Fury’s show – delivered to a small audience – is a very unique piece of stand-up.
Political figures – Trump, Johnson, Farage – are obvious choices for c*ntdom, and are rightly lampooned for their words, actions, and ideology. This harks back to the cartoons in Punch and other forms of satire in the 19th century periodical field, when the term was suggested through the visual.
Elsewhere there is a bit about the political power of the c*unt as a part of the body, and a discourse on how the word turned into a derogatory term very quickly. I’d like to hear a bit more on this, or even see it at the top of the show (for a whole piece on “reclaiming the c*nt”, see Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues).
We also hear about Fury’s own life to a point – a person of Anglo-Indian heritage who is attracted to c*unts – and as this is a live delivery we get a sense of her performative style. In her publicity blurb she is defined as “a brown, bisexual, nb bird” and has a bubbly, irreverent prescence.
However, I was left feeling that the “profanity and PowerPoint” was fine, but didn’t really need to be a livestream. Fury’s live style needs an element of warmth and applause you can’t easily get on Zoom – and C*nt could work just as well on-demand.
There is so much to unpick here in a show which ran forty-six minutes at a fairly cracking pace. The visuals are often comical and quirky (our PM on the zip wire, an old street name in London) and move quick and fast.
This was Fury’s first time presenting the show in an exclusively digital format, and it possibly needs a little tweak here and there with regards to structure and interaction.
However, I enjoyed the show and it did make me both think and laugh.
Becky Fury in C*nt streamed live on 10 February as part of the Living Record Festival. Find out more about Becky Fury here.
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