TRIGGER WARNING - Rape, Mental Health
Back again with another digital fringe review!
This time I've sat down to watch 'Sh*t Show'.
I really love one-person theatre. There is just something about the genre that I find so electrifying! The intimacy of it all, along with that sense of stakes for the performer (they don't get to go offstage and let someone else get the heat for a while--it's all down to them!) makes the whole thing so exciting as an audience member.
We begin in the waiting room of a hospital when we are joined by Jessica, played by Kathryn Marper.
It starts off a little awkward as she speaks to us, but doesn't every conversation with a complete stranger in a doctor's waiting room start off that way?
We learn about her journey of navigating through therapy for the first time. She is struggling to come to terms with whether or not she has been sexually abused on a recent date and is hoping that therapy might help her come to some sort of answer.
Therapy is such an interesting thing. When we are not feeling well mentally, it’s considered socially as an almost last-resort after cups of tea and a nice walk doesn’t magically fix things. We are getting a lot better at normalising how helpful it can be as opposed to the older generation (An aunt of mine, bless her heart, burst into tears when she found out I had been seeing a therapist for a while.), and it no longer carries the sort of stigma as it did before. But, although we are getting better at accepting it, the vast majority of society really doesn’t understand what therapy is really like.
'Sh*t Show' sits us down for a no bullshit chat about the realities of fixing your mental health. It shows us that therapy isn’t the relaxing little afternoon chat where you open up, have a little cry, and feel so much better as your therapist gives you the manual on how to be well again.
Marper shows us the reality of not clicking with your therapist, of hating them, and also of YOU being a little bit of the problem!
It’s not something very nice to admit, but when we are going through therapy, sometimes we are just simply not our best selves. We can lash out more often, our thoughts can be destructive to ourselves and to others, and we are literally tearing open emotional scabs and bleeding out trauma in every session. Therapy can be a horrible experience, and it’s easy to blame our therapist for this.
Don’t get me wrong, there are therapists out there that you wonder how on earth they ever got into their profession, but I appreciate how 'Sh*t Show' tackles this subject of perseverance through having to adjust to a completely different way of thinking and being. It isn’t easy but holy moly is it rewarding in the end.
I do feel, though, that 'Sh*t Show' has room for improvement, especially in terms of how the therapist is portrayed. I felt sometimes that the therapist was a little one-note, and although I agree that sometimes it can be that the patient is struggling to adjust to change, it can also be the fault of the therapist for not working with the patient to understand what would best suit their needs. It’s all too easy to paint a therapist as a stuck up, upper-class, RP-English-accent-having wannabe hippie with no idea of what it’s like for the working class. I just felt that we lost a bit of humanity and realism with the therapist with her berating of Jessica and her complete disconnect where points were not addressed. Although Jessica does admit to it being partly her fault due to not being in a space where she was ready to face the challenges of therapy, I also found myself thinking 'Why on earth did you go back to that therapist?'. I wonder, though, with some more development of the therapist's character would I still be feeling the same way.
Overall, though, this is a fantastic play! It is also another shining example of how the Free Fringe has so much to offer to festival goers. I am hoping that the show returns for Fringe 2026, and I am so excited to see how it has developed since first premiering. Should it return, I would highly recommend going to see it; it is such a fresh take on mental health that I hope more people will get to see it.
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