4 hours ago
8
We are all familiar with the cliche of the influencer narrating their daily routines – or should I say, their journey? – and trying to convince us, and perhaps themselves, they are living their best life. We know, too, about the websites offering intimate access in exchange for cash.
But what if the online medium were put to more honest purposes? What if, instead of endless positivity, it presented a painful recovery from trauma?
It would, suggests writer and performer Verona Verbakel, be cheaper than paying for therapy. After a back-of-the-envelope calculation, she estimates she would need 2,599 sessions with a psychiatrist at £70 a time to get her through a lifetime of recovery. The cost, either in cash or in continued trauma, has to be paid by someone.
The exposure in her solo show, OnlyFans for Therapy, is of the emotional not the naked body kind. It concerns a woman haunted by the abuse she suffered as a five-year-old and the additional anguish of an investigation when she was 18. Confident and assured one minute, she crumbles the next – the damage for ever just beneath the surface, raw and inescapable.
Part of the Big in Belgium programme, Karolien De Bleser’s production has a characteristically Belgian disregard for theatrical convention. Verbakel’s role is to sit, stony-faced at a laptop, occasionally catching our eye, and seemingly indifferent to the content of the first-person videos she shows in sequence.
At turns upbeat and tearful, Verbakel appears in videos that vary from lying in bed wearing a sleep mask and reciting a drily comic list of emotional triggers to the actor making painful expeditions to the scene of the original abuse and breaking down as she does so. The direct-to-camera honesty of the online world makes the pain all the more vivid in a brave, unsettling show.
At Zoo Playground, Edinburgh, until 30 August
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