Writer: Meg Wilson
Directors: Kitty Fox Davis and Meg Wilson
Showing as part of the King’s Head Theatre’s Springboard festival for emerging artists, Babydoll compares sex work with the worker exploitation inherent in startup culture, and suggests the latter may be the more damaging.
Demi Wilson-Smith’s Zeena has moved abroad for a new job as a PA in a feminist startup, but when she arrives finds that she’ll be living in her male boss’s apartment, which doubles as the company office.
To make matters even more awkward, he uses escort services, claiming that startup hours aren’t conducive to more conventional dating schedules and entertaining the thought of marrying whichever young girl he is paying at the time.
One such escort is Billie (Dylan Morris, who also dons an oversize jacket to play Boss) who is “let go” for having the temerity to speak “out of turn”. As Boss, Morris is a fair weather feminist, ready to suggest that his use of escorts is assisting women at their stratum of society – just as long as they know their place.
Billie is another matter. Confident in her sex work but passionate about pursuing a career in fashion design, she finds a friend in Zeena that slowly, charmingly, believably, grows into romance.
Zeena’s struggle to accept Billie’s sex work forms the crux of the piece. Wilson-Smith and Morris spark well off each other, and Meg Wilson’s elegantly constructed script refuses to let them go down well-worn paths of whether to praise or condemn Billie’s work.
Instead, Zeena’s willingness to question her girlfriend’s income stream is contrasted with her refusal to do the same to her own professional life, with Boss stringing her along in an overworked, underpaid role. Despite that, Wilson-Smith’s character never quite matches Morris’s in terms of written depth, and this is reflected in the ability of each actor to wring the best emotional beats from Wilson’s script.
Still, the hour spent in the company of these characters and actors is time well spent. The conclusion to the piece is a little perfunctory, but that seems a rare slip in an otherwise assured directorial grip (Wilson sharing directing credit with Kitty Fox Davis). Babydoll is an assured and enjoyable piece, and one which deserves to truly be a springboard for its creators to ever greater things.
Continues until 9 April 2022
