“Good Girl”, as far as I could gather, was a structured improvisation performance incorporating adult variety show techniques. Creator and performer Rhiannon Jenkins is too sweet and innocent in real life for this sort of material, and was completely out of her depth. This performance was at the Kings Arms, as part of the Greater Manchester Fringe Festival.
I’m going to be a little direct on some points, because on Rhiannon Jenkins’ website it says: “I never knowingly do or allow harm” and “I will take on feedback with curiosity and open-mindedness.”
It began well. We were all welcomed into the space by a glamourous Jenkins in a red evening gown, who graciously gave us vodka jelly shots and asked about our journeys to the venue. Once we were
settled, the music came on and she sang a song with filthily smutty lyrics while writhing in sultriness.
We were straight into the adult variety show genre. Then she went into her first improvisation with
the audience, and quickly discovered a problem. The wrong sort of audience had turned up. For
which she had no Plan B.
I think – this was deducted over the evening – that Jenkins originally researched what the secret
fantasies of heterosexual men are, and considered that as a young woman she is on the receiving
end of all of them. Her show was built around lots and lots of sexy improvisations with the
heterosexual men in the audience, trading on the frisson and their secret guilt. However – only 32% of
theatregoers are male, and the proportion who are heterosexual as well is smaller still. Last night, not a
single audience member was in this demographic.
It takes a lot of chutzpah to sustain “bad girl” comedy, and Jenkins’ started to dissolve as she tried to
work around the problem. She began using the men who were there in the improvisations, and they
were very good sports about it. Meanwhile, the women were mostly ignored. This was very
unnecessary: most of the population is impacted by male sexual desire, and everyone could have
been encompassed if it had been thought about in advance.
Jenkins seemed to be internally panicking a bit, because she began inflicting comments on her
participants about their personal lives. That crossed a line. I saw faces going still. I saw flashes of hurt
in eyes. That is not good audience participation.
There were health and safety concerns around bodily fluids, such as passing her sweaty tights to an
audience member, and putting an unsterilized thermometer in an audience member’s mouth.
Halfway through, she started a slideshow. This was a rapid parade of images, based around
stereotypical fantasies. It appeared to be trying to bring black humour into the show. One image was
titled “Marilyn Monroe”, and showed a covered body on a stretcher. Another was titled “Pre-Teen”,
had an actual illustration of a wide-eyed little girl, and was then referenced three times. There had
been no bedding in of black humour earlier in the show, and this came out of nowhere. I’m just
going to point out that experience of child abuse is much more common among the general
population than people realise, and audiences are not crash test dummies with no personal
backgrounds of their own.
By the second half, Jenkins was really flailing. I don’t know what she normally does in the show at
this point, but it appeared she was now grasping at straws, and literally making it up as she went along.
Sounding desperate, she made a suggestion of misandrist group gender-based violence to the
audience. No. Please don’t go there. The audience didn’t engage, and she dropped it.
I think it was possibly a relief to everyone when it ended.
This COULD be a very good, entertaining and insightful show. But it needs some serious thought and
reworking first.
Reviewer - Thalia Terpsichore
on - 8.7.23
on - 8.7.23
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