The revisiting of 00’s celebrity culture – especially relating to women – is everywhere at the moment, and not in a way that casts the period in any kind of favourable light. Megan Prescott – who first rose to fame as Katie Fitch in Skins – has taken her own unique experience as a child star who came of age in the spotlight, and combined it with her considerable talent as a writer, director and actress. The result is blistering, brilliant and at times hard to watch.
Portraying Molly Thomas – a child star partly based on her own past and partly based on the stories of others navigating the entertainment industry – Prescott is magnificent. Her presence fills the stage, and she exposes her own vulnerability – both mentally and physically – with incredible power and rawness. The show moves through some very uncomfortable material – we see Molly on a casting couch that pushes and pushes her, castigated by other female voices as responsible for sexual attacks on all women, and constantly belittled in her personal relationships.
For the audience, complicated feelings from these various scenes come up incredibly easily. There’s sickness for what Molly is going through. There’s sickness for the ways in which you’ve been complicit, or at least engaged with, so much of the malignancy of 00’s celebrity culture. And if of a certain age, there will be sickness at the parts of the show which might remind you how you’ve felt crushed by, belittled or made unsafe by that same culture, even without any kind of fame. These are exactly the kinds of questions and feelings such a show should inspire, and it does so with such a light and often very funny touch, despite the heaviness of the material.
Though it takes a positive attitude towards sex workers, the show does not defend or exult porn. It is more that it exposes the hypocrisy of so much of the rest of public and private sexuality for women in society. If you’ve already been exposed, exploited, had your body picked apart, drooled over and shamed, and been subjected to sexual advances you did not want – why does an invisible line of hypocrisy exist if you turn round and say, if this is what’s happening to me, why shouldn’t I take full advantage and sell my body on my terms, not someone else’s? And with attitudes towards those who choose sex work still extremely dismissive and belittling, Really Good Exposure offers an important view of the other side of the argument.
Really Good Exposure has finished its run
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