Kitty Dollparts. Camden People’s Theatre.

Writer and Director: Rhiannon Lucy Bird

Rhiannon Lucy Bird’s short one-woman performance piece, Kitty Dollparts & Other Performing Objects, mashes up verse, monologue, original song, and extensive audience interaction to explore competing feminist perspectives on pornography.

Airing the radical anti-porn critique is the character of Birdy, played by Bird herself in a pitch-black trouser suit straight out of a city law firm.  The pro-sex, choice-based viewpoint comes from Kitty, a garish character played by multiple puppets dressed in fishnets, a pink bikini, leopard print gloves, and over-applied lipstick. “You’re a slut,” says Birdy. “You’re a prude,” retorts Kitty. The debate is more sophisticated than that, but this is the territory.

Bird’s conclusion seems to be you can be a feminist and watch porn, but it would be nice if the actors had workers’ rights. Anticipate a singing laptop, a hunky pizza delivery guy, a wall painting using a dildo, and an opportunity for the audience to air Camden Town liberal platitudes about sex and porn.  Avoid the front rows if you are disinclined to engage. Birdy gets to keep her clothes on, and Kitty gets her kit off, so broadly speaking, everyone leaves content. It is fine as an exercise in polemic; as theatre, it is thin.

Birdy bemoans the loss of a time when women’s bodies were represented in art as “still, silent and statuesque muses”, vehicles for something other than “ogling and entering”.  Was there ever such a time? Not in “21st century pornified Britain”, which is “bound in the scrotum of the capitalist patriarchy” and where our porn browsing histories reveal “the most private parts of ourselves”, Birdy insists. Kitty incarnated variously as a shower curtain, a hand-puppet, marionette, ventriloquist dummy, and full-sex sex doll, laments the feminist view of porn users as “incapacitated adults” and celebrates her identity as “a sex-positive freak”.

Kitty Dollparts & Other Performing Objects has some solid rhyming verse. Bird knows how to pen and deliver a lyric. Unfortunately, the various performance elements do not cohere into any obvious theatrical vision or direction. Part of the problem is that she gets the audience to do too much work. At one point, with no apparent intent beyond exhibitionism, she has audience members read out fruity descriptions of some of the more obscure types of online porn. At another, we have to read out viewing statistics culled from a large adult website (apparently, Father’s Day sees a significant uptick in search for “daddy” porn). It is interesting enough in its way, but convincing theatre it ain’t.