By Pony.Child, Melbourne Fringe Festival
Upstairs at Errol’s, Fringe Hub, Errol St North Melbourne, Sept 20 to 27, 2013
Reviewer: Kate Herbert
Stars:***
Full review published in Herald Sun online Sept 23, 2013. KH
Olivia Monticciolo, James O'Connell. pic.Lachlan Woods
By the year 2050, most of
the sex workers in major cities will be robots.
This not-so-bizarre
prediction by two New Zealand researchers is the premise of Emilie Collyer’s
cute and quirky, sci-fi, black comedy, The Good Girl.
A young woman (Olivia
Monticciolo) lives an isolated life working as the manager-madam for a female
sex-bot that serves the male population of this futuristic, urban world.
Sex in this unpleasant
world is clinical, removed from relationships, manufactured through software
programs, and isolated in robot brothels to avoid any spread of disease.
When the designated
technician (James O'Connell) services the off-stage sexbot, he and the madam
discover that she/it is developing emotions – she cries and pleads with men not
to leave her – and that clients will pay big bucks for her ‘humanity’.
They expand her emotional
range to jealousy, anger, nagging, and finally fear, the last of which causes an
unexpected and violent outcome.
Collyer’s witty
two-hander merges black comedy with the absurd and the political, using sharp,
well observed and funny dialogue.
Her script challenges the
commodification of sex, the dysfunctionality that occurs when it is isolated
from human emotion, and the ugly relationship that can arise between violence
and sex.
..continues
Full review will be published here soon. KH
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