Slap & Tickle, Tobacco Factory Theatre, Bristol

Music, script and choreography: Liz Aggiss

Reviewer: Julia Beasley

Liz Aggiss is lewd, rude, randy and extremely funny. The sexy 65-year-old puts her privates on parade to comic effect in this challenging one-hour, one-woman series of often disturbing, taboo-busting feminist tableaux.

In Slap & Tickle, she produces snakes from her bra, balls from her knickers and coins from her vagina. Her props include a creepy doll, a rag foetus, and a pubic wig. She makes the audience pass the parcel and play with sausage-shaped balloons, inciting: ‘rub it, lick it, and toss it’.

Combining opera with end-of-the-pier culture, this crazily creative performance examines the pain and pleasure of women’s lives starting with Liz’s own childhood in the 1950s. Her tame, sexist upbringing is shredded, and she gives the most hilariously subversive rendering of Doris Day’s Que Sera Sera you’ll ever hear. Sexual arousal, childbirth, domestic servitude, the menopause, and old-age incontinence all come under her intelligent, penetrating gaze.

It’s a clever and well-choreographed performance as Liz Aggiss fearlessly exposes herself in order to satirise female cultural oppression and ultimately celebrate the lives of all women. And the audience gets to take home the balloons.

Runs until 10 November 2018