Edinburgh review: DollyWould (Summerhall)

Sh!t Theatre – Louise Mothersole and Rebecca Biscuit – declare with their standard deadpan irony that this will be their "mainstream crossover hit". Hey, it’s got potential: everyone loves Dolly Parton. But anyone expecting a straightforward tribute will be discombobulated by this show – gloriously so, as it pings off in all directions, a tasty tangle of associative leaps and connections.

It’s a celebration of Dolly, and it nods towards her ridiculousness. The pair went to Dollywood in Tennessee, and took plenty of holiday snaps, mostly of the insane amount of Dolly-branded tat you can buy. They’re obviously genuinely psyched by the trip, while also obviously a bit cynical about the whole thing. This knife-edge combination of genuine affection and ironic ambivalence runs right through the show: there’s eyebrow raising towards Dolly Parton’s world-dominating ambition, her plastic figure, her aggressive self-branding. But there’s also a seam of genuine anger at the icky sexism she’s always cheerfully faced; snippets of interviews build to reveal an almost macabre obsession with her figure, and how ‘real’ or otherwise it is.

Talking about Dolly Parton, therefore, becomes a way to talk about authenticity and fakeness. The singer once entered a Dolly Parton Drag Queen competition; of course, she didn’t win. The performance of her is more real than the real thing. And DollyWould is also about another Dolly – Dolly the sheep, the world’s most famous clone, who was named after the singer. Sh!t Theatre find fruitful assonance between the Dollys. A genetics expert Dr Kat Arney explains that while clones may have the same DNA, each is a unique performance of that. Just like each drag Dolly Parton.

And it’s not just Dollywood they visit in the US: the other nearby ‘attraction’ is the Body Farm, a research institute where donated dead bodies are left out in various conditions so that how they decompose can be studied. You can’t really visit it – but, just like Dollywood, you sure can buy plenty of branded souvenirs in the giftshop. Sh!t Theatre have fun smashing together images of Dollywood and Body Farm merch; images of her well-preserved body, images of decomposing bodies.
Their trademark rackety, low-budget, loose’n’live style is in evidence here, and the show features – obviously – musical interludes on the banjo and mandolin. And in the pair’s increasingly daft outfits, they become both Dolly Parton and Dolly the sheep: they don big curly white-blond wigs, shaggy as sheep; they cut holes in their t-shirts so their breasts hang out. They bleat Dolly Parton songs.

DollyWould may not have much of a narrative; it never builds to anything quite as satisfying as their last show, Letters to Windsor House. But it’s enjoyably slippery, as Mothersole and Biscuit constantly find and forge connections between disparate strands, and you’re constantly recalibrating significance. DollyWould‘s slyly clever construction can be brain-bending if you let it, but it’s also just very good fun: their brilliant comic timing ensures proper guffaws too. Great stuff.

DollyWould is at Summerhall until 27 August.

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