Good Girl review – one woman's quest to inhabit her body
‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” Simone de Beauvoir asserted in The Second Sex, and this becoming is the subject of Naomi Sheldon’s debut show about learning to inhabit a female body that the world is intent on defining and confining to stereotype.
Growing up is a diminishing process for Sheldon’s character GG (short for Good Girl) in this hour-long monologue, and it looks more like a kind of “un-becoming”, as she transitions from uninhibited girlhood, delighting in sexual desire, to an unhappy and sexually numbed, womanhood.
Along the way, the teenage GG is ogled and laughed at by men, her vagina is deemed too hairy by boys at her school, and she is variously labelled a “whore” and a “psycho-bitch”. As a result, she vacates her body in spirit, becoming alienated from her needs and desires even as her male partners satisfy theirs. The show, directed by Matt Peover and available online from Soho theatre, describes GG’s existential odyssey to return to her body and to define herself from inside rather than out.
Filmed at the Old Red Lion theatre in 2017 and coinciding with the #MeToo campaign, Good Girl chimes with that movement but extends beyond it, too. From the repeated refrain for little girls to be “good” to the pornographic ideal of the hairless female body, its themes seem to have been around long before and yet still fester today.
The performance takes on the feel of a standup show as Sheldon stands in darkness, telling her story to the room. Childhood nostalgia and comic whimsy is combined with vignettes about masturbation and sex toys, and it is entertaining but not all of it sounds new: the comic tone to the study of her vagina and the pre-pubescent discussion of orgasms are familiar, and the 90s soundtrack of Madonna and Michael Jackson that marks the years feels a little formatted.
But it hits plenty of original notes – and dark ones too, from the dissociation she feels during sex to the everyday despair that grows out of it. There are some woozy moments – she feels like her body’s borders are blurred, porous and “leaky” as a girl – which are intriguing but might have been further developed.
The end offers a happy outcome that is too quick and under-explained, but by then Sheldon has won us over with her characterful portrait of millennial becoming and unbecoming.
• Good Girl is streaming at Soho Theatre On Demand until 28 August.
