Rosa Garland: Primal Bog Review – A Slippery Dive into Desire with Tattoo Live | platform

‘IIt’s divisive.” Well, you might think so, a “weird performance art” clown show with nudity, bodily fluids, maggots and Gwyneth Paltrow. However, Primal Bog left the Edinburgh fringe last year with praise ringing in the ears of its creator Rosa Garland. To the degree that Garland is a winning and fearlessly provocative performer, I’m happy to join the chorus. But – hey, it’s divisive – I didn’t find the show as divisive as some in the audience. It’s a crude title for weirdness. and physicality, vital to image-making, and cheerfully elusive when it comes to meaning – more inclined to celebrate than to offer insight into misbehaving bodies and privileged desire.

Garland shows her hand from the first moments, urinating into a vase, then smearing herself from head to toe with the orange substance. And that’s what she does to Paltrow’s supposed character, the owner of the “health brand” Goop — against whom the show positions itself against her airbrushed vision of feminine grace. Here’s Garland with slime dripping from her chin, her breasts, and the tip of her nose. Here she is sitting on a folding chair, or handling an earthworm. In another scene, she recounts a dream about joining a community of masochists in their mountain hideaway.

I had longed for more clarity and coherence, and that fantasy gave way to a sequence in which our hostess details her desires while prostrate on the floor (sightlines are an issue) against abstract fragments of video on an upstairs screen. Elsewhere, as Garland is given a tattoo live onstage as we watch a film of a man riding a boat, the strangeness and charm of the scene – but only just – prevents patience from waning. Garland has an attractively non-artistic way in which she moves not over, not under, but through (Michael Rosen appears) all that gunk and grime and oozing corporeality – which matters to a rendition it shares with another delinquent song from Edfruit 25, Creepy Boys’ Slugs. It’s an unconventional watch, not a comfortable one, and it posits in Garland’s psychosexual fantasies a world more real and more brutal than Paltrow’s philosophy could ever dream of.