Sophie Duker’s Venus ☆☆☆☆
Soho Theatre , London
Sophie Duker knows her audience. Tonight’s one hour one woman show at the Soho Theatre is a hilarious double dutch of playing with expectations. Duker knows she is the triple threat of black, female and queer whilst acknowledging that anyone in her audience is probably going to be there because they are down with that. She is more than happy to serve a little bit of ‘smug currency’ to the people who come, do not quite get her material but like to tell people ‘it’s important that they are there’. The audience loves her for playing with that tension.
The double dutch metaphor is the kind of thing that Duker rails against. Having spent her childhood trying to avoid being good at anything that was stereotypically that black including dancing, basketball and twerking. She didn’t have much use for them at Oxford University.
Duker explores the obvious topics of male, white privilege head on. Her eye is acute, observing that Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is exactly what you would get if Hugh Grant was sorted into Slytherin. But her material is strongest when it’s directed to her own life. She goes right up to the stereotypes that people presume are positive and slaps them sideways. How many times has she had some over enthusiastic gay man yelling “Yaaaaasss Queen” at her for her looks? Who knew the gay community had so many closet monarchists? And when is someone going to say “Yaaaaassss my Elected Representative” or “Yaaaasss my Attorney General”.
Duker tours family relationships and the unexploded bombs of technology and social media. The brief but intimate relationships with Uber drivers, the problems of responding to aunties on social media where engagement is as risky as negotiating with terrorists. However, her butchering of stereotypes is where the best meat is at. The name of the show is a reference to the Hottentot Venus, one of several 19th century African slave women who were paraded through European freakshows for people to gawp at their difference and fetishize their body parts. Whilst Duker is unapologetically there for the laughs the politics of the reference course throughout her show. Duker knows that good steak has a bit of blood on it. So does her audience.
Directed by Saima Ferdows
Tue 29 Oct 2019 – Sat 18 Jan 2020
https://sohotheatre.com/
Review by Andrew HebdenQueerguru Correspondent Andrew Hebden is a MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES graduate spending his career between London, Beijing and NYC as an expert in media and social trends. As part of the expanding minimalist FIRE movement he recently returned to the UK and lives in Soho. He devotes as much time as possible to the movies, theatre and the gym. His favorite thing is to try something (anything) new every day.
Labels: 2019, Andrew Hebden, London Theatre, review
