Courtney Pauroso @ Pleasance Courtyard
Gorgeously precise physicality in sexy clown Courtney Pauroso’s return to the Fringe
Courtney Pauroso returns as sex robot Vanessa5000, a logical evolution for the ultimate sexy clown, and Pauroso’s clowning skills are very evident in the gorgeously precise physicality of her new creation – from the staring eyes to the delicacy of the slightly tweaked index fingers, it’s a mesmerising study. It’s a great premise, too: a product demonstration of Vanessa5000’s superb functionality as a one-stop pleasure centre (three holes – all dishwasher safe), but fallibilities soon emerge.
Faced with a fantasy sprung to life (tiny PVC underwear, fishnets), there’s a frisson of both excitement and fear in the public spectatorship of material usually consumed in private, and Pauroso clearly delights in leaning into this; at one point there’s a malfunction and Vanessa5000’s twerking gets stuck on repeat, a ‘glitch’ which requires help from the audience. There’s a similar sense of trepidation, when she analyses individuals picked at random, and we momentarily fear what her ‘data harvesting’ might reveal.
In one such scenario, a tender moment arises. ‘Do you ever get sad?’ she asks, then brightly, a beat later, ‘try Feel Better™’. It's a lovely joke that’s characteristic of the show’s satiric range: mocking both the impulse to anthropomorphise technology (as a robot, she just doesn’t care) and the marketisation of care. Many such heavyweight issues are glanced at, but all with an eye for absurdity than correction: the outsourcing of intimacy; the implications of AI adaptive learning, surveillance, the self-exposure expected of women. And perhaps because Pauroso is trying to cover so much ground, the show does occasionally feel a little piecemeal, a series of segments that don’t always fully cohere.
After all the permutations of Vanessa’s erotic capabilities, we finally seem to hit some kind of ‘real’ to the strains of Radiohead’s Fake Plastic Trees – but it’s just the emo, stripped-back version – and yet another layer of this very funny, very intelligent show.
Courtney Pauroso: Vanessa 5000, Pleasance Courtyard (Beneath), until 27 Aug, 9pm, £12