Edinburgh review: The B*easts (Underbelly)

Actress Monica Dolan has been gracing our stages and screens since the early nineties. She was superb as Rosemary West in Appropriate Adult on TV, and excellent again in the recent Plaques and Tangles at the Royal Court. I’d say she’s one of our best, and often slightly overlooked, acting talents. And now she's making a stab at becoming one of our best writing talents too.

Clearly not one for pussyfooting around, Dolan makes both her performing and writing Fringe debut in the same show. The B*easts tackles the exceptionally uncomfortable subject matter of the sexualisation of society, and, more specifically, of children. She’s definitely got guts.

The B*easts starts slowly. As Dolan enters we soon realise she’s a kind of therapist, but here it’s her who’s talking, we’re listening. She’s explaining a case she’s been working on, a high profile one in which – look away now if you don’t want spoilers – a mother was arrested and put on trial for enabling her 8 year-old daughter to get breast implants. The thing is, though the story she tells is oblique at first and builds to its reveal of the girl getting plastic surgery, it’s not really a spoiler. Dolan’s character explains everything, from beginning to end, with an experienced clinician’s eye. Before we know what has actually happened she dissects the child's early desperation for attention, her obsession, as a two year-old, with the pictures in her mother’s magazine of women with perfect boobs. You can kind of see it – or something like it – coming from the off.

Despite that, it is still uncomfortable to hear it, and the events after the surgery are also hard to digest. The key thing in this play, however, is how Dolan’s character makes us understand, rather than judge. What happens is demonstrated to be the cumulative psychological effect of the sexualisation of women’s bodies, of children and of society’s desire for the perfect body. And actually, it doesn’t seem like that far-fetched an idea. Dolan places this situation slap bang in the realms of possibility. And that’s chilling.

The play takes a little while to lift, but in its best moments The B*easts is excellent. Taut, compelling, almost thriller-like, Dolan takes us through this journey from the view point of the mother, of the daughter, of the newspapers and more. We are left with a 360 degree portrait. But the horror is never fully provoked, and though there are hints that Dolan’s character has more connection to the story than we might think, this narrative thread never quite merges with the main thrust of the story.

Still, this is an accomplished, insightful and unnerving debut, which shows Dolan’s talents lie not just on the stage but on the page too.

The B*easts runs at the Underbelly until 27 August.

For all our content from this year's Edinburgh Festival click here