REVIEW: OH MY PAIN, MY BEAUTIFUL PAIN at Pleasance Theatre until 1 Mar

'self-aggrandisement and dramatic fall from grace' ★★★★

Relish Theatre’s strikingly-named Oh My Pain, My Beautiful Pain investigates the use and misuse of trauma as a springboard for artistic expression. The protagonist Natalia (Evie Fehilly), having found success years ago with her one-woman show exploring the aftermath of an assault, finds herself having to delve ever deeper into her trauma in order to create work harrowing enough to satisfy her overbearing agent (a star turn by Posey Mehta) and fans.

While this all sounds like a pretty heavy-going evening of theatre, the combination of drag, clowning, poached egg themed tap dancing and hallucinatory dream sequences swirl together to create a genuinely joyful piece of absurdist theatre, which takes difficult themes and rids them of their power by pushing them to Dadaist extremes. At times this in-your-face messaging can get a bit tired, with a little too much of the second act consisting of Natalia begging other characters to “go deeper” so that she can mine their pain for her own work. The message is instead at its strongest when the play loses all grip on character development and plot and instead goes full fantasy, launching into dance sequences to pop songs edited so that every other word is “trauma”.

The costumes, designed by Daniel Hall, are beautiful and deeply covetable, from a pink skeleton suit to a dress featuring Goya’s ‘Saturn Devouring His Son’ which Natalia wears while delivering a fateful Tedx talk about exploiting your own pain. The show works perfectly in the Pleasance London’s cabaret-style Main House, a glittering, velvet-draped backdrop to Natalia’s self-aggrandisement and dramatic fall from grace. The staging is simple, and could be pushed a bit further in future to match the camp extremes of the show, but great use is made of projection, as we see Natalia’s frenzied writing spill out across the screen to thumping beats.

With the tidal wave of autobiographical one-woman shows popping up more and more frequently in Fringe venues and praised with words like “brave” and “raw” it is refreshing to see theatre makers grappling with the repercussions of such public intimacy, both for the audience and for the artist themselves. Is artistic success worth the repeated reminder of the worst moment of your life? And can any of these theatre-as-therapy-sessions lead, in any real way, to healing? 

Oh My Pain, My Beautiful Pain at Pleasance Theatre 7 February - 1 March 2025

Written by Evie Fehilly

Performed by Evie Fehilly, John-Luke Roberts and Posey Mehta

Directed by John King

Produced by Morag Davies for Relish Theatre

Box Office: https://www.pleasance.co.uk/event/oh-my-pain-my-beautiful-pain