Review by Kate Gaul
Josie Dale-Jones sits at a small table to one side of the stage. In 2022 Dale-Jones and her company were supposed to be touring a piece made for children and their parents and guardians called “The Family Sex Show”, a theatrical attempt to reimagine how children and their carers might talk openly and without shame about sex and relationships, boundaries and consent.
A Daily Mail article and online misinformation unleashed a maelstrom. Dale-Jones was dubbed a paedophile and encouraged to kill herself; someone threatened to bomb the theatres where the show was programmed. Nobody making these threats had seen the show (the hadn’t been fully finished at the time), but theatres cancelled the tour, and the Arts Council withdrew support. All this information is presented in a series of monologues. Dale-Jones plays a section of a horrible podcast and sits listening as swearing and insults continue. A fabulous article written by Dale-Jones for the Guardian goes into some detail about the show, its content and intentions. I encourage you to read it as the implications of the actions around the cancellation of the show have genuine resonance.
Importantly, she notes, at the time: “A relatively small media storm closed a show no one had watched. Beyond arts and culture, what does this reveal about the health and resilience of our public conversation? How does this event speak to power in the UK? Who has it, and how will they use it? Who gets to decide what on behalf of other people? I think what has happened is far more frightening than the performance. We still hope to find a home for this show. And now I am left in the position to wonder: where do we go from here?”
“A Little Inquest into What We Are All Doing Here” is a story about resilience and survival. It’s about courage and determination. How did all this happen? How did her work become hit by the spotlight (and made explicit in the opening moments of the show)? And importantly what is the impact of our increasing inability to agree to disagree about all sorts of things effects our interactions with each other. Dale-Jones explores whether educations is keeping children safe or adults comfortable – and at what point reasonable critique becomes hate, and verbal online abuse escalates into real-life physical violence. At the end of the piece the show has become a duologue with a man. “No-one comes out of it very well,” she says, but as the man she’s talking to replies: “Maybe that’s what makes it interesting.”
I’d describe the show as at the pointy end of the scale. Its conceptual at one point when Dale-Jones takes to the stage to do a dance routine to “That’s Entertainment” dressed in a gold lamé suit. But then her initial entrance is rolling across the stage in what looked like a sleeping bag for which I can find no explanation. Because we are participating in the work of a seasoned theatre maker there are a couple of coups de theatres involved which certainly move it away from it being a dry talking head type experience. Which is what it may sound like. In a nutshell – a culturally significant argument delivered with panache and intelligence by a charismatic and driven artist.
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