Notorious Strumpet & Dangerous Girl
Notorious Strumpet & Dangerous Girl - ★★★★★ Summerhall Main Hall - Venue 26 - Ticketing Info 21:55 - Aug 3-12, 14-19, 21-26
Notorious strumpet: she stole my phone, like she stole my heart...but I still haven’t gotten my heart back.
Full disclosure, I was on my second pint when I went in to Notorious Strumpet. But I promise neither that, nor that fact that we were offered tea, coffee, and biscuits altered my opinion. OK, maybe the biscuits did. Note to performers: BRING BISCUITS, automatic five stars!
But even without the biscuits, this show is easy to love. This was another suggestion of my flatmate, B, but I was brought to it by our mutual friend R so lets just say they BOTH picked this one for me. Once again, this is one where I turned up without even knowing the name until we were in the queue to go in.
The show is framed as an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. While I’ve never been to one, I have known someone who was a member and so now I understood about the tea and coffee and biscuits...it all made sense! Very cleverly done and an initial tick in the favour of our featured performer, Jess Love.
One member of our group loves the chance to interact with performers, so insisted on sitting in the front row. Always terrifying, but in the performance you had no idea what might happen. Luckily, Love seemed to have a sixth sense for how far she could push boundaries and how uncomfortable to make the audience before, much like in her trapeze act, she pulled things back to safety.
This show is funny, insightful, and exciting. I was a little shocked by the nudity (you can take the girl out of the Bible Belt, but you can’t put a naked woman on stage with her saying “oh my stars and garters!”), but it’s nudity that makes sense within the context of the show. It helps tell the story, it doesn’t just shock you or titillate you, it exposits! (I’m coining the phrase Expository Nudity from here on out).
A lot was happening on stage, from circus performance, to comedy, to confessional, and there were lots of props and costume changes (see also: nudity), but the show didn’t rely on any gimmicks or props for the sake of props. Everything was a tool to tell the story, using the skills Love has in circus, comedy, and storytelling.
I would have been equally captivated watching her perform in a bin bag lit by a flashlight (though that might have made some of the acrobatics a bit difficult), and I think you will be to.