Boy Parts at Soho Theatre – review

If Boy Parts was a drink, it would probably be a Pisco Sour, a cocktail that starts off sweet and tangy but ends up clobbering you, lethally. Before we even see visual artist Irina (Aimée Kelly) we know she has a sizeable ego: Sara Joyce’s staging opens with the Noir-ish credits to a film, Irina’s film, and she appears to have undertaken every creative role mentioned and cast herself as the moody, tear- (or is that blood?) streaked model, brooding photogenically from the big screen. Moments later we encounter her in the flesh, and it’s rather less elegant; she’s just been face-slapped in the Newcastle bar where she works part-time, by the mother of a 16 year old she’d taken pictures of and who’d shown her a fake ID. Irina’s reaction is pragmatic, robust, and it’s clear from the way she manipulates the bar manager into giving her the rest of the night off that she’s the sort of person who tends to get what she wants.

The early sections of Gillian Greer’s script, adapted from Eliza Clark’s 2020 debut novel, play out like yet another variation on the trope of modern young women behaving badly – Fleabag and last year’s sleeper hit One Woman Show spring immediately to mind – as Irina’s flaws and fractured relationships are gleefully rolled out. Kelly has a lot of fun transforming with a change of voice and an adjustment in stance into various figures in Irina’s life. It doesn’t feel particularly original but it’s highly entertaining, sometimes a bit gross, mostly very funny, and Kelly is a knockout, at once disarming and a little dangerous.

It turns out though this is just to lull the audience, or at least those who haven’t read the book and so won’t have any idea what’s coming, into a false sense of security. Think you’re here to watch a comic monologue about a narcissistic young woman (again)? Clark, Greer and Joyce seem to be saying…. well, just you wait, buckle up.

Irina’s creative bag is to photograph young men in various positions of vulnerability, and while her motives and methods sometimes seem questionable, it’s hard to get too censorious since she’s only treating her male subjects the same way men have done to women for generations. One of them appears to sexually assault her and gets rather more than he bargained for….or does he? The creeping unease starts to really take hold when the suspicion dawns that Irina may be a less than reliable narrator, and the visual imagery that obsesses her becomes progressively more disturbing.

Boy Parts – the apparently slightly naughty title becomes queasily ambiguous as the piece unfolds – is about coercion, power, the fetishisation of bodies and how a surfeit of these things can lead to a severe disconnect with reality and basic human decency. The writing and Kelly’s performance actively play up the raw pliability of some of Irina’s victims, especially Eddie, the Tesco worker she picks up and who prefers not to show his face on camera as he’s about to train as a primary school teacher. Placing Eddie’s tranche of the story quite late in the narrative is an interesting choice as he has an innate, almost pitiable, niceness that by this stage is eluding our alarming anti-heroine, and seems to place her once and for all beyond redemption.

Joyce’s stylish production is like a lightning bolt that briefly, shockingly illuminates a night sky before leaving everything in its wake darker, more desolate than before. As Irina makes specific text references, oblique flashes of imagery appear for a nanosecond behind her – some jokey, some just plain weird – and when she rolls on the floor in a drugged stupor, her own lethargic body and face taunt her from the screen overhead. Hayley Egan’s video design includes repetitive footage of Irina in her studio but, as with everything else, what starts out cute becomes more and more sinister. Christopher Nairne’s increasingly bilious lighting and Tom Foskett-Barnes’s ingenious, meticulously detailed sound design are almost characters in their own right.

Technically flawless though this all is, none of it would work so well without Kelly’s astonishing central performance. Physically and vocally adventurous, she thrillingly devolves from sassy, sexy and humorous to rootless, predatory and frankly terrifying. Because she’s so real and relatable, if not necessarily all that likeable, at the beginning, it proves exceptionally disturbing to see where she, and we, have ended up by the end. Her sketches of other figures in Irina’s life, such as the violent suited ex-con who turns on her mid-photo shoot or Florence, her silly but kind flatmate-cum-landlady who misguidedly tries to help her career, are done with economy and unerring accuracy. She does knowingly funny, molten rage and downright unhinged with equal, brilliant conviction. Known primarily as a screen actor, Kelly emerges here as a thrilling new theatre star.

Although it’s breathlessly compulsive, edge-of-your-seat stuff, I’m not sure, ultimately, what the point of Boy Parts is. Is it an assertion that women can behave just as horribly as men? Is it exploring the acceptable limits to making art? Is it a working-class English female response to American Psycho, with its ambiguity, and Irina’s fetishistic imagery as a substitute for Patrick Bateman’s greed? The relentless carnival of nastiness may prove off-putting for some, but this is unquestionably a striking piece of theatre, powerfully presented, with a sense of palpable discomfort that sticks to you long after the show is over, like that nightmare you can’t quite shake off. Approach with caution.