Bryony Kimmings - Sex Idiot - New Wolsey Studio (Pulse '10)

[Edit: since this review, Sex Idiot has won a Total Theatre Award, gained a perfectly respectable review from Lyn Gardner and become the toast of the Forest Fringe. I have no idea whether the show has changed from what I saw, or whether I'm in a humourless minority, but it's probably worth reading a few other reviews beyond this one]


There’s a problem with Sex Idiot, namely that it’s unclear whether it’s the most rubbish “performance art” you’ve ever seen or an unfunny character comedy pastiche of the worst “performance art” “Bryony Kimmings” has ever seen.

It doesn’t matter, though, since it’s excruciating either way.

The basic premise of the show is “Bryony Kimmings” talking about herself (I'm going to keep her in quotation marks for a bit, because I'm not at all convinced she's actually a real person). Or, rather, roughly the last decade of her sexual history, occasioned by the discovery that she recently caught Chlamydia, and that she'd broken up with a boyfriend, had to move house, and so ended up going through boxes of old emails and letters from ex-partners. It later transpires that she caught Chlamydia off her new partner, so all the “soul”-searching turns out to have been unnecessary. But, here it all is anyway.

Her sexual history is wholly unremarkable for someone of her age. She's had a four “serious” boyfriends and slept with some other people in between or during them. She takes an hour to tell us about this.

There is the alternative that none of this is specifically true (or at least it is based on nothing more than the entirely predictable relationships and break-ups that a vast majority of people have in their twenties). Which would beg the question: why go to these lengths to make up and talk about something so utterly, utterly trite?

Except that these banalities are the peg from which she hangs the puzzling “performance art” dimension of the show. This is the element which could qualify the piece as “character comedy” – a kind of mini-narrative satirising this “artist” who creates these “performances” to mark “significant” emotional episodes in her life (“I call this the dance of the lost baby” – Really. I shit you not. And the “dance” itself is terrible. Unwatchably terrible. And not even in a “it would be funny if a “performance artist” *said* that” kind of car-crash, comedy-of-cruelty sort of a way. Instead, it’s just terrible.)

The show’s one real achievement is that it achieves a kind of anti-catharsis. Instead of cheering you up, making you laugh, moving you, or reminding you of the astonishing feats of talent, imagination, generosity and nobility of which the human animal is capable, this show really does make you feel the sheer pointlessness of it all. More than Kafka, more than Camus, more than Beckett, "Bryony Kimmings" is the “artist” who most makes you feel the grinding, grating, relentless banality of human existence.

Even all this might be excusable if there were a scintilla of wit. There isn’t.

Oh, but there are songs. She can't sing, but there are songs. That might be a joke too, either because the songs are meant to be funny, or because it’s meant to be funny that this made-up “performance artist” is singing them. In the event, they aren't funny on either level. By way of example, one song is a list of words for vagina set to the tune of Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues, complete with Kimmings doing the words-on-pieces-of-paper video. It’s an ok concept, if just about the most hackneyed imaginable – and one that feels like pre-existing material being crow-barred into an already ramshackle structure. She then adds ineptitude to unoriginality by having all the words written onto piece of cardboard which are too thick to hold many of. So she writes words on both sides. And then has to rotate the pieces of card rather than coolly dropping them as Dylan does. Perhaps that’s a visual gag too. It just looks like someone not really knowing what they’re doing. Oh, and she runs out of words and phrases for vagina about halfway through verse two and has to start repeating them or making them up. Again, maybe that’s part of the complex matrix of humour.

The fact that you can’t tell if it’s meant to be a satire of “performance art” (which itself could be a satire of the sort of satire that people who know nothing about performance art make when satirising performance art) or if she really means these things to be comic pieces of performances in their own right is pretty indicative of the level of total failure we’re looking at here.

In short, all the jokes are rubbish, and if that’s the joke, then this a particularly rubbish example of that one-joke joke.