Feb 8

Feb 8 FRINGE REVIEW: "Slutdrop" and "30 Day Free Trial" are the perfect fringe double-team

There is very much a common theme between the shows Slutdrop and 30 Day Free Trial, showing at Pica and The Blue Room Theatre this week. These are intelligent shows from local theatre makers which interrogate our relationship towards the consumption of sex - whether that is out at strip clubs or in the soft glow of internet pornography.

Slutdrop explores the world of the strip club from the view of the women who work there. Jacinta Larcombe is a performer who has previously worked as a stripper in a club, and she has used this experience to inform her one-woman show Slutdrop. Slutdrop is, in case you were wondering, a dance move in which someone drops suddenly to the floor and straight back up again. It’s a move commonly associated with strippers and pole dancers that anyone who has seen Hustlers will immediately recognise. In fact, Jacinta uses movies like Hustlers, Closer and even the 1995 so-bad-it’s-good Show Girls to comment on the ways strippers are portrayed in the movie industry. With assistance from blow-up doll companion Sally, Jacinta shares tips, stories and questions with an audience who thanked her with an enthusiastic standing ovation.

In 30 day free trial, Charlotte Otton and Andrew Sutherland (admittedly two of my favourite Perth based theatre makers) are the consumers of porn and bonded over their shared interest in sex and sexuality. The result is a hardcore 55 minutes of smut. The two talk frankly about their relationships with porn, and in the process interrogate their own tendencies towards performing sex. I doubt this is an experience unique to these two. The show is a house of mirrors, and as an audience member, you're never quite sure if they are telling us true stories or performing the tales they think we want to hear from them. That is, right until the very end when they talk about how, the experience of sex enables them to exist in the moment.

Both shows are hysterically funny. Slutdrop has the benefit of being informed by the lived experience of a thoughtful and joyful human being. Jacinta’s dance at the end of the show is worth the price of admission alone. Meanwhile, 30 Day Free Trial is a knowing interrogation of the porn industry, and the ways we are conditioned to respond to it. There is an underlying longing for romance running through this work that gives it a bittersweet feel.

They are well worth seeing as an almost co-located doubleheader, and a precursor to some deep and meaningful red wine-fuelled late-night conversations about sex, life and money.