Comedy of the blackest kind: Boy Parts, at Soho Theatre, reviewed

There’s something mesmerising about watching a good mimic. And Aimée Kelly, who plays fetish photographer Irina Sturges in Soho Theatre’s Boy Parts, is a very good mimic. Across the 80 minutes of this one-woman performance, she inhabits the bodies of dozens of characters, each a carbon copy of the worst kind of person: oleaginous city bankers; shrill, hysterical twenty-something women; ‘Andrew Tate-core’ men.

Her sneering representations of these characters instruct us to see them (whether we want to or not) as Irina does: pathetic and deeply undesirable. It’s uncomfortable. Irina is a narcissist which is enforced, immediately, by the opening scene: a huge video showing close-ups of her tear-streaked face set to haunting, slow music. The credits roll. Her name flashes up as the director, cinematographer, art director and everything else.

There was a buzz around the production before it ever made it to the stage. Boy Parts is an adaptation of Eliza Clark’s 2020 debut novel of the same name, which went viral on TikTok and garnered a cult following. It follows Irina, an artist with a proclivity for taking explicit photographs of anonymous, feminine-looking men, as she floats through days at her bar job in Newcastle; through drug-fuelled house parties; through her house-share with her clingy, grating friend Flo. But the monotony of her life is broken when she is invited to show her work at a London gallery. The task of creating something worthy consumes her, causing her to look for more and more extreme ways to prove herself as an artist – no matter the cost to the subjects of her portraits.

The play is split up into segments focusing on each of the ‘boys’ Irina photographs. There’s Will, who she snaps while shaving off his new beard (he thinks it makes him look like Jason Momoa; she disagrees); an older man who turns violent; and an unnamed boy who ends up as nothing more than a severed head.