Eliza Clark’s bestselling 2020 novel arrives on stage in a darkly comic dissection of art, power and gender politics
Can the male gaze be inverted? The authority on patriarchal voyeurism in film, Laura Mulvey, is sceptical, concerned that the sexist conventions of cinematic language are so deeply entrenched that they are impossible to break from by simply switching up traditionally gendered roles: the one who is looked at, and the one who does the looking. Not that Hollywood and Marvel haven’t tried, bringing us relief in recent years in the form of Ocean’s 8 (2018), Hustlers (2019), and She-Hulk (2022). We don’t need feminism any more, folks – women can be The Hulk, too!
Eliza Clark’s 2020 novel Boy Parts parodies the protagonists designed to capitalise on highly marketable iterations of feminism in the 21st century, female empowerment serving to rack up serious profits, with her strong female lead Irina Sturges. Irina’s unreliable narration takes these characterisations to the extreme, mirroring Brett Easton Ellis’ Patrick Bateman in her penchant for menacing sex and ultra-violence. A sabbatical from her bar job and an unexpected opportunity to exhibit at a trendy London venue reignites a pursuit of her artistic career: Irina takes erotic pictures of average looking men scouted from the streets of Newcastle, pushing her subjects – preferably young, vulnerable and eager to please – ever further for the perfect shot.
Adapted for the stage as a one-woman show by Gillian Greer and produced by Metal Rabbit, Boy Parts is showing at Soho Theatre until Saturday 25 November, starring the compelling Aimée Kelly. Gallery-style labels are projected in sequence across the theatre’s back curtain as the audience takes their seats, giving an idea of Irina’s photographic signatures (‘Boy with glass in his eye, 2023’; ‘Boy in Bunny Head, 2023/ nudity, fur’), and the opening sequence, with production and acting credits populated solely by Irina’s name giving way to a lingering close up of her eye, establishes her controlling, voyeuristic nature from the off. She is thrilled when she chances upon her latest target Eddie behind the checkout in a supermarket, ‘the Oscar Isaac of random lads who work in Tesco’. ‘I don’t usually touch the models’, she tells us less than reassuringly for the second time, but her charm, beauty and assertiveness invariably has her subjects ready to do anything she wants.
Irina portrays her flatmate Flo with a definitive menace and sneering superiority, her exaggerated girlishness and earnest, high-pitched tones played for comic effect. Flo reminds Irina that she likes to think of herself as ‘not like the other girls’, a depressing soundbite proliferated by social media in line with the Cool Girl phenomenon, internalised misogyny sparking a desire to separate herself from all women. Irina is an antithesis to ‘other girls’ taken to extremes, wondering ‘what I have to do for people to recognise me as a threat. Do I have to smash a glass over the head of every single man I come into contact with, just so I leave a mark?’ Most women don’t like to chop people up and put them into bin bags; she finally stands out from the crowd, with a darkly humorous nod to the logical conclusion of ‘quirky girl’-type tropes.
Irina’s tastes for sexual violence and exploitation translate into an anecdotal spectacle of horror. We are desensitised to such spectacles: an influx of media from mainstream news sites, netflix true crime documentaries and celebrity revenge porn distributed via online channels show people doing awful things to each other, all the time. People who grew up in the internet’s early years had very little regulation over the content they could access with the click of a mouse. Contemporary, oversaturated horror does not have the same effect, the same call to revulsion and action produced in someone seeing such shocking images for the first time. Susan Sontag speaks of this familiarisation in her criticism, implying the artist’s responsibility to defamiliarise the horrific, rousing the viewer with a reinvigorated desire to tackle the world’s problems.
Irina expresses her frustration in attempting to escape and address the imbalance of the male gaze. The production seems hyper-aware of the difficulty of doing so, the one-woman piece stripped back and bare in terms of set with little to distract from us watching her, the audience’s gaze as razor-focused on lone Irina as her camera on her chosen subjects. However, rather than shocking us into truly seeing the violating objectification of the visual arts by placing a woman behind the lens, Boy Parts has the effect of the familiar, this role-reversal horror porn inevitably feeding back into and reinforcing countless other depictions of eroticised sexual violence. While often challenging, complex, and funny, the production’s satirisation and critique of contemporary media takes on female agency is too nuanced. That our sadistic storyteller is a woman feels like a rehearsed rather than revelatory reimagining of gendered power dynamics; depicting non consensual brutality in the hands of conventionally attractive women is ultimately not particularly helpful. The very thought structures that built the sexual imbalance of the gaze need to be examined and deconstructed in order to break from its confines: it certainly won’t be broken with the ‘female gaze’ in the form of pandering to the same objectifying masculinity. American Psycho, Girlboss edition? There’s work to be done yet.