Part of Big in Belgium, Verona Verbakel’s Only Fans for Therapy is a one-woman show about the aftermath of the sexual abuse she experienced. At ZOO Playground, Verbakel is already sitting there with her MacBook waiting for us, while a projector sits on one of the seats. There is no conventional stage setup separating her from the audience; instead, the equipment is already part of the space, preparing us for a performance that will happen largely through a computer screen.

The show starts with a video playing on her computer. In it, Verbakel appears naked, covering her breasts with her arms as she cries and tells us about her experience of sexual abuse. The title Only Fans for Therapy may lead some audience members to expect something else, and they may be disappointed by what they see. But that disappointment is part of what the show is doing: it creates an expectation of looking, then makes us confront what we are actually looking at. 

The video is followed by others in which she walks us through the aftermath of the sexual assault, including her experiences with the police, the institution where the abuse happened, her psychotherapist, and her work as a theatre maker. Shot at different times and in different places, she usually talks directly to the camera, with occasional diversions as she tries to work out the cost of continuing therapy for the rest of her life, or has the most civil conversation imaginable with ChatGPT about how to perform trauma on stage or how to make a joke about trauma as comic relief during the show.

Most of this happens silently as she operates the computer. The only time she performs directly to us live is when she reads a letter delivered on a toy car by a member of the staff. It is a letter from her lawyer explaining why she will not be able to stay with her mother after the case investigation. The contrast is striking: the most direct encounter between Verbakel and the audience comes not through a reenactment of her trauma, but through reading the words of someone else.

This connects to an experience Verbakel describes in one of her videos with the Belgian theatre group Ontroerend Goed, when a male colleague asked her to tell her story of being sexually assaulted on stage. It becomes an example of how asking someone to share their trauma in the name of art, even with the intention of creating a universal response, can itself become traumatic and harmful. Only Fans for Therapy takes the opposite approach. Verbakel refuses to turn her experience into something that can simply be consumed by an audience. Instead, she controls how much of herself we are allowed to see, using self-recorded videos, the computer, and the occasional live encounter to find a way of speaking about what happened without reproducing the demand that she perform her trauma for us. The result is a work that turns the act of watching into part of the question, asking not only what it means to tell a story about sexual abuse, but also what it means for an audience to watch it.

Only Fans for Therapy is at Playground 3 at ZOO Playground until Sun 30 Aug 2026