Flawstate’s Babydoll Review
Saturday 9th April 2022 at The King’s Head Theatre, London
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Reviewer: Khaya Job
Last week I had the absolute pleasure of watching Babydoll, an original, energetic production written by Meg Wilson and produced by Flawstate. During lockdown last year, Flawstate’s Bored of Knives was one of my highlights, being one of the most exciting plays I’d ever seen. I was very keen to see Babydoll.
Babydoll follows the complicated relationship between Zeena and Billie (played by Demi Wilson-Smith and Dylan Morris), two young women who are both trying to make their own way in the world and trying to define what being empowered means to each of them, whilst also navigating their complicated love. Zeena struggles to accept that Billie is a sex worker, and what that means for their relationship. Having met Billie through her new boss - who is also a family friend - the play really highlights themes of boundaries and difficulties that young women face today.
I really enjoyed Babydoll. The soundtrack was vibrant and absolutely banging, the set was clever and you could tell that the writers were touching on their own experiences. Sometimes scripts about sex work or even homosexual relationships can be borderline offensive and over dramatised, but Babydoll wasn’t like that. I loved that there were no villains - all of the characters were equally as flawed as one another - there were no clear answers: right or wrong. This allowed for each character to be fully human. I felt like the relationship between Zeena and Billie was really refreshing to see on stage and the actors had amazing chemistry and delivered the roles with conviction.
Zeena enters into this new world somewhat naive, however is very headstrong and has some rigid beliefs and options. When it comes to her boss, she struggles to speak her truth. Billie was more laid back than Zeena, and I wish we could have learned a bit more about her story. I thought it mirrored society well in the fact that people have so many opinions about sex workers but we rarely get to hear about their truth - directly from them. I felt this was touched upon in the play when the boss brings home a young escort and, in a later conversation between Billie and Zeena, Billie tells Zeena to stop talking on behalf of the escort.
How do we define what’s wrong and what’s right? It’s so hard to find your voice as a young woman in society when all of the lines are so blurry these days. I find that the questions we keep coming back to is: what is true empowerment? What empowers you? How do we reclaim our power? How do we rewrite our own narratives? These were all questions that Babydoll left me asking myself and I found the whole experience riveting. Congratulations to Flawstate, Meg Wilson, Kitty Fox Davis and the entire cast and crew for creating yet another incredible, beautiful and thought provoking play.
To find out more about Flawstate and Babydoll, check out the link below.
https://kingsheadtheatre.com/whats-on/springboard-babydoll
@flawstate