Never let it be said that political theatre can’t be hilarious, that shows that make an audience uncomfortable can’t also produce devotion, and that works that explore the creation of art must be navel-gazing. FlawBored’s debut show It’s A Motherf**king Pleasure, playing at Bristol Old Vic Weston Studio at the end of a tour that has taken them from the Vaults festival to Edinburgh, to New York, and beyond, is complex, knotty, sometimes squirm-inducing and always like a gut punch to the solar plexus in its hilarity inducing punches. Taking potshots at ableism, identity politics, and the vacuous world in which people fear saying anything in case it is taken the wrong way, it’s a fringe show that is fearless in its focus on disability-led art and withering in its knowing eye about its critic-proof format and funding eligibility identity.
It’s a work that plays out both in sketch and narrative formats, sketches delivered directly by the hugely likable performers, interspersed with dramatic construction of a narrative story about a blind influencer who falls foul of his own form of faux pas in a television interview that goes wildly off-piste. The sketches include an early introduction where we see the impossibility of offering inclusive needs in theatre for all, starting with touch tours and leading to screaming for those hard of hearing and offering of earplugs ‘for the gays’ to captioners with dreams of their own and bracing real-life examples of events where the companies ever ridiculous ideas have been out satirised by real life.
One of the trio of co-founders Aarian Mehrabani was unwell for this leg of the tour and so another layer of meta-theatricality was added, as an able-sighted, black performer Phillip Olagoke, script-in-hand, was roped in to portray Mehrabani, a blind Iranian performer. It provided a different veneer to a show that also incorporates fellow blind performers Samuel Brewer and Chloe Palmer who met on the BA Acting CDT course at Central, providing some disconnect between the lines heard on stage and the captioning (can’t be helped but unfortunate).
Dramatically, a last-minute gear change into gruesome self-reckoning feels a little misjudged, taking the work into the territory it doesn’t have the space to engage with, but mostly it is a thrillingly smart evening of work, that also takes aim at ACE and theatre critics in its hares. There is little need to demand positive reviews, this is a show to shout from the rooftops, one that suggests a company who are going to tackle our contemporary ideas around identity politics with a razor-sharp scalpel. The day after opening, their next commission was announced, The Pleasure of F**cking Your Mother, which will look at separating the art from the artist. Expect more liberal pounding.
Kris Hallett- life as theatre 