Good Girl, a clown-comedy for adults only, showcases Rhiannon Jenkins, teases men in the audience, and focuses on filth, kink, and sex. It also offers provoking and pointed comment on how to be a woman in a world that objectifies and often humiliates them under the male gaze.
Parading in a swimming costume, Jenkins has an assured tone and a naughty delivery (“let’s rummage around in my drawers together”). She embodies each of the tropes of classic male fantasy.
A confident performer who takes the sex clown trope and subverts it in style, she plays all the sexy stereotypes for the men in the audience, challenging them to react in the way nature intends.
There’s satire, basic humour, physical comedy, and irreverance here in deconstructing difficult topics , but they often depend on how the audience members go for the interaction .
Without a responsive crowd, this show would fall flat so it is quite a risk for Jenkins to go down the improv route with a room of unknowns. It could backfire badly.
The sex clown uses humour to challenge the world’s uptightness around the body, Jenkins, with her face make-up and her ingratiating style thrives on the discomfort of her victims whether on stage or in their seats.
Every show will be different, clearly, depending on the make-up of the crowd, and what I would have liked to have had a sense of is how women watching in the audience reacted to this show throughout, rather than in the final sequence.
With cock, pussy, cum and dildo jokes a-plenty, Jenkins tears up the rule book of how a woman should approach sexuality and pokes fun at the typical male fantasies.
Ultimately Good Girl may be about communication, respect, and solidarity, but is that really it? It is about not being made into an object and being regarded as a woman, not just a body. Actually, being regarded as a person, not a woman, not a body.
Imagine that.
***.5
Good Girl played at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.