Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

This is an interesting but unsuccessful variation on the sex clown trope from Rhiannon Jenkins, a Boston-based actor, writer and producer of theatre. 

Scoping out the men in the audience before the show, she extracts names and Consent from everyone on what they’re about to undergo.

Good Girl deconstructs tropes of seduction, female objectification and the hetero fantasy largely by playing into them – the vast majority of this show is a staring contest with the male gaze as Jenkins role-plays the sexy nurse, the sexy teacher, the sexy student, all at close range, daring her terrified audience participators to blink first. Her confidence and voraciousness have a wrongfooting effect, reducing the men to quivering wrecks. 

The point to all this is made a little too clearly by the end, but until that point you’re mostly waiting for the other shoe to drop, as Jenkins’ horny role-play is only occasionally played for laughs. There’s a soundboard full of silly effects and she has a couple of good parody songs, but the writing between those moments only has a background hum of comedy, like the camp and innuendo-laden dialogue you’d hear in an old porno. 

Jenkins’ clown makeup is a present reminder of the tone she’s aiming for – the show might actually be more challenging if she didn’t use it.

Her performance as a vamp is more dramatically convincing than it is effectively comedic.  It’s an interesting choice to play the part as parodic but not grotesque. Where most sex clowns are messy and weird, Jenkins is hard to read, more like a classic Playboy bunny until the make-up comes off at the end.

And after 40 minutes of enigmatically directed play with scared men, it’s that denouement which brings the show thudding to the ground, as the clown nose becomes a foghorn for a selection of Route One talking points. It’s one of those shows where only assholes would disagree with the arguments (equality, safety and agency for women) but the validity of the message doesn’t relieve the artist of the burden of expressing it in an interesting way. 

Jenkins’ tack is to say it loud and proud, but she doesn’t manage to make it resonant.

Review date: 16 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Paradise In The Vault