Apparently Kylie Jenner is one of those people who is famous for being famous which is usually a guarantee that I’ve never heard of him/her/they.  But she’s famous enough to have inspired Jasmine Lee-Jones use her as a hook for a play; Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner, that opened in the Studi Tneatre at Crow’s on Thursday night in a co-production between Crow’s and Obsidian Theatre.

There are two characters.  Cleo, played by Déjah Dixon-Green, is a straight, dark skinned, woman with a fixation on the fact that KJ makes a ton of money out of promoting “typically African” (full lips, thick thighs) which are considered beautiful on her but are held to make African women look “primitive” or “monkey like”.  Using the handle #incognegro she goes on a Twitter rant about KJ which predictably starts a very ugly flame war ending up with images of, for instance, the lynching of a black woman (which, of course, doesn’t contravene Twitter’s “community standards”).

Mixed up with all this is her friendship with Kara played by Jasmine Case.  She is a queer, much lighter skinned woman.. a “lighty” in Cleo’s terms.  When the two women row, which they do for much of the play’s 90 minutes, it’s usually about their shared past; especially it’s sexual element, and how they perceive that they, and other black women, are seen by men (perhaps especially white men).  In between all the street slang and text speak there’s some serious narrative about how black women have been exploited for their exoticism and then discarded.  There’s a lot of anger and a few digs at a previous generation of civil rights activists.  There’s not much tolerance for MLK-like passive resistance here.  It’s probably deliberate too that queer Kara fits typical male ideas of female beauty much more closely than straight (but “dick deprived”) Cleo.

All this plays out on a set that consists of an enormous bed with cushions and soft toys surrounded by TV screens which display typical social media quotes plus headlines from the world’s press as the KJ Twitterstorm goes global.  The women converse in a mixture of standard English, London street slang and textspeak.. .”YK GTFO of my TL Bitch” is about typical.  When they are talking over each other this can be quite hard to unpack despite the glossary provided in the programme, but we get the main thrust.  Director Jay Northcott and his cast create a fast moving, sometimes very funny, sometimes thought provoking experience and there’s an unexpectedly cute ending.

It’s playing in the tiny Studio Theatre at Crow’s so the audience is right on top of the action which creates an atmosphere that is simultaneously claustrophobic and voyeuristic.  This definitely reduces distance between audience and players in what is a very intimate show.  It’s the right venue.

So there we have it; the pervasive (pernicious) influences of (anti)social media and “celebrity culture” bound up with cultural appropriation and sexual politics from a black female perspective.  It’s quite a ride.

Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner runs in the Studio Theatre at Crow’s until May 26th.

Photo credit: Dahlia Katz