EDINBURGH 2011: BWW Reviews: SCARY GORGEOUS, Bedlam Theatre, Aug 11 2011

After their success with Another Someone at last year's festival, RashDash return with a new piece which explores the theme of sex, sexiness, and how it all relates to love.

The main piece follows two friends who are exploring the boundaries of female friendship while an underlying current of jealousy and competitive insecurity demonstrate how complicated the dynamic can be. Meanwhile, we also follow a 19 year old couple who are trying to determine what role sex plays in their relationship, and how far they are able to push their own boundaries without becoming removed from their own desires and simply following what they think they should be doing.

Part play, part contemporary dance, part live music, the piece is polished but raw. It is performed well, both in acting and dance, with Abbi Greenland and Helen Goalen sharing all the main characters between them. While the simultaneous friendship and tensions between them in the main story are played out well, the secondary story has a very different tone. We see touching, but most definitely not sappy, glimpses into a very real relationship between two young people who are unsure what they want sexually, and perhaps more troubling to them, what they are supposed to want.

As always with RashDash productions, minimal props in a limited space are used creatively and successfully, while the live music enhances the emotion of each scene, in this case a live band also being a part of the story itself. This is not a show for those who are prudish about sex, or for those who don't like loud music, but it is a well-performed, well-written, honest exploration about the ways we go about discovering sex and love.