Hannah Tomes Hannah Tomes

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

The buzz around this adaptation of Eliza Clark’s 2020 debut novel is wholly justified

Aimée Kelly is mesmerising in Boy Parts at Soho Theatre. Image: Joe Twigg Photography

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.

An unnamed boy ends up as nothing more than a severed head

Her sneering representations of these characters instruct us to see them (whether we want to or not) as Irina does: pathetic and deeply undesirable.

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