EDINBURGH 2023: Review: PLEASURE LITTLE TREASURE, Underbelly Cowgate

The Soviet Union has collapsed. Supermarkets are empty and people are queuing outside in the middle of the night to grab a bottle of milk and a few potatoes. The streets of the Eastern Bloc are ruled with an iron fist by the Russian Mafia. McDonald’s opens their first location in the East and everyone is crazy for it. Elina Alminas writes a lively autobiographical one-woman show about growing up in a strip club in 90s Estonia. Opened by her grandmother and featuring a distinctively feminist outlook to the profession, the Pleasure Palace becomes a safe-house for little Elina until it’s taken over by local organised crime.

Exploring the cruel effects of the post-Soviet patriarchal system, Pleasure Little Treasure is entertaining and funny in all the right places, but it features a weak structure and arbitrary changes of pace. Dry humour and a tongue-in-cheek attitude ease the crude clichés and sex jokes made by the men who surrounded her in her youth. The beauty of the piece lies in the soft look at her matriarchal family and the loss of power that came once they were stripped of the ownership of the club.

At this stage, it might be a bit wobbly, but promises great potential. It’s a portrait of toxic masculinity and female empowerment, a personal reflection on the horrors experienced during the regime. Mostly, it’s genuinely amusing. Alminas spins a yarn full of peculiar characters and relentless social commentary. She just needs to tinker it appropriately.

Pleasure Little Treasure runs at Underbelly Cowgate until 13 August.

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