★ ★ ★
This show by Tiff Stevenson covers a lot of ground, providing comedic insights into topics as diverse as why you shouldn’t give weed to random people, the movie ‘mother!’ and the difficulties of using certain menstrual hygiene products.
Stevenson is clearly at ease with her audience, and has an engaging stage presence (She also dealt excellently with a random comment from the crowd towards the end of the performance I saw). She’s also been really ambitious with the material that she covers within this show, covering a number of potentially very fraught issues, but she manages to accomplish her aim of bringing nuance to these discussions. Furthermore, when she gets going with a story, it’s well-paced and very, very funny.
In spite of this, although the individual sections of the show are very strong, it didn’t feel like the show had a strong enough through line. A number of possible very interesting through lines are touched on throughout the show, such as Stevenson’s experience of having ADHD (The titular ‘Sexy brain’) and the attitudes of society towards older women, both of which would have made for a great show if done in isolation or if linked together. However, it often felt like the two topics were fighting each other for airtime, as well as various other very funny but unrelated-to-what-seemed-to-be-the-main-topic stories. This meant that it felt like we were always only skating on the surface of something really innovative, purely because there wasn’t enough time for each topic to get the attention it deserved. A consequence, I think, of this is that a lot of the insights that were offered didn’t feel particularly novel or like they were being presented in a particularly novel way. I agreed with everything she was saying, I’d just heard all the points before. I think that if more time had been given to any of the larger ideas discussed in the show, Stevenson would have been able to get deeper into things to offer up some different insights, or alternatively would have had more time to present them in a different way.
An enjoyable show that has a lot to offer with material that has a lot of potential, but that maybe needs to be restructured for the potential to be unleashed.
Tiff Stevenson: Sexy Brain Pleasance Courtyard – Pleasance Above 20:00 (1hr) Aug 9 – 29 £14/13. 16+
Review by Ella Catherall.
