‘I would love you to rearrange my insides.” It’s a shocking line that would stand out in an Edinburgh fringe show but belongs to OnlyFans content creator Bonnie Blue, whose invitation to more than 1,000 men to have sex with her over 12 hours is the subject of a Channel 4 documentary. In actor-writer Issy Knowles’ monologue, the setup is similar: on a stage dominated by a bed and littered with condoms, Pollie arrives in a blue silk dressing gown to meet a thousand subscribers as she grants them each a freebie.
Pollie is given her own queasy lines of enticement to her fans. But how do you satirise a phenomenon – sex as competitive sport – that is already so extreme in nature? Knowles humorously deadpans Pollie’s insistence that she finds her enterprise erotic, saying how sexy it is to oversee hundreds of legal waivers for the men. Pollie’s discovery that her first visitor is above the age of consent is played as comic frustration, though the question of the character’s predatory behaviour is not deeply pursued. Wearing fake plastic buttocks and breasts, Knowles trains a steely gaze and fixed smile on the audience, who are given the choice to wear balaclavas, like the men queueing for their turn, yet the scattering of masked theatregoers adds little to the atmosphere.
Knowles considers Pollie’s religious upbringing and first boyfriends but also how society creates and reacts to such sexual extremities. This is done through a voiceover of interview-style questions, many of which are more probing than in Channel 4’s documentary. Pollie compares her “liberating” work with her past career as a consultant, the office tasks choreographed as sex acts. The movement direction is frequently bold to match the bluntness of the script.
The flashbacks can be indistinctive but Knowles also delves into the minds of the men in the queue, generally less held to account than OnlyFans stars, and their parasocial relationships with Pollie. She plays an incel spouting conspiracy theories whose violent fantasies are followed by erectile dysfunction. The writing balances dark humour with serious assessment of the men’s discontent, anger and desire for control, recognising the role, too, of ragebait in Pollie’s success (“hate is money … money is power”). She is always compelling in the troubling encounters with expectant subscribers who believe they are not just “only” fans.
At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 25 August
