Georgina Collins serves men on the menu in a ferociously talented one-woman feast.
“I’m so hungry I could eat [my best friend’s ex]” is a line any chronically online zillennial has told their friend, meaning nothing more than an ordinary kind of hunger. Georgina Collins’s SUCCUBUS takes that throwaway line and asks, but what if you meant it?
Cannibalism as a euphemism for carnal desire is not a new concept, Ducournau’s Raw staked its claim some years ago, but Collins clearly has more to say on it. What starts as a grievance against medical misogyny, a young woman’s body dismissed by doctors as merely “hormonal,” curdles by degrees into a study of appetite, sexuality and power.
Two panels sheeted in plastic circle the stage, a premise that reads first as practical, nobody wants blood on the upholstery, and only later as a joke at the audience’s own expense. Three black cubes are hollow enough to hide a prop and sturdy enough to take a seated actress; over the course of the evening they turn into a speed-dating chair, a confessional seat or whatever the scene calls for next. The blackouts between scenes are brisk and used for the fun stuff, resetting props or staging the next kill, while the costume changes are worked into the scenes.
A voiceover accompanies her victims throughout, but the best one comes first, hers, before the play even properly starts – a ‘mock’ PSA warning of the gore to come. It’s an excellent preview of what you’re in for the following hour.
Collins is, essentially, the whole show. She swings from full-throated screaming to a shy giggle as though changing gears rather than characters. It’s hard to picture anyone else pulling this off, the comic timing and the sheer nerve of going full feral on a Sunday night in front of strangers isn’t something you can teach. There’s a real intelligence at work under the gore, the sense of someone who knew exactly what she wanted to say. Burlesque background aside, this is a pure writing talent and it would be strange if we didn’t hear more from her.
It would have been easy to leave this as a straightforward ‘eat the patriarchy’ romp. Instead the show tracks something slipperier with self-defence hardening into appetite, appetite dressing itself up as ethics. The arc is close to a radicalisation story, a woman doing something understandable once, then again for less clear-cut reasons, until the justification and the hunger become impossible to separate. Just when you’re braced for a tidy feminist-revenge ending, it doesn’t give you one which is a braver choice than the crowd-pleasing version would have been. The show also has fun with the discourse that inevitably follows gendered violence and plays it back with enough wit to sting. Underneath the camp and the fake blood, it’s a show interested in what happens when righteous anger has nowhere left to go and starts feeding on itself instead.
It is gory, it is horny (frequently both at once) and it is held up entirely on Collins’s shoulders. Ethical consumption in an unethical world was never going to be a tidy proposition. SUCCUBUS makes an unusually entertaining case for attempting it regardless, and is a triumph anyway.
SUCCUBUS runs at Omnibus Theatre, London on Friday 24th July.