Review: Sex Idiot, Zoo Roxy

Written for Culture Wars

How serious is Bryony Kimmings? Sex Idiot – a collection of cabaret turns on and around her recent diagnosis of Chlamydia – hits the clichés of performance art so often, I can only assume she intends it as a self-parody. She is, after all, proclaiming herself an idiot, so the earnest but mediocre artist seems an appropriately buffoonish persona.

So we get a version of Dylan’s Subterrean Homesick Blues composed of vaginal euphemisms, a clumsy pelvis-thrusting dance entitled “Sex? Yes!” and tears induced by tiger balm while Richie Valens’s sob-song Crying plays. Kimmings even goes so far as to fashion a moustache out of pubic hair donated by the audience. Her material is cheap and brash and nasty, but it is deliberately so.

The thing is, most idiots don’t know that they’re idiots, and those that do don’t step onto a stage to play the idiot. They are ashamed of their idiocy. That there’s a knowingness to Kimmings’s performance makes Sex Idiot an exercise in self-flaggellation. She is playing the fool in public, humiliating herself for one reason or another.

In that case, there needs to come a moment of sincerity. At some point, she needs to mean it. However, just as you think she might be serious, she undermines herself with a comic clunk. What looks like a heartfelt love song, tinged with sadness, to a man with whom she fell in love, is sabotaged by its inept, monotone chorus: “Me, me, me, me. You, you, you, you.” When she finally delivers a series of apologies into a microphone, she cannot resist the descent into the comic.

The clue, funnily enough, is in her underwear. While Kimmings parades in a series of ridiculously extravagant costumes, from lederhosen to feathered headdresses, the bra and knickers to which she strips are comparatively demure and classy. Underneath it all, there’s a vanity that belies her clowning and public disgrace.

To give Kimmings her dues, though, she is a sparky, funny and likeable performer. There are shades – albeit quite consciously – of Ursula Martinez with added chaos. If you’re in the right mood and mindset, Sex Idiot will probably entertain and engage. Personally, it lost me or, perhaps, I lost it. I suspect that’s possibly a product of my being male. To be honest, my inner-cynic can’t stop questioning Kimmings initial motivation. At what point, on receiving notification of an STI, does one think: “There’s a show in this?”