Lily Phillips has had her fair share of being objectified.  She trained as a dancer then worked on the lower rungs of show business. She used to get paid to impersonate the blonde Disney princesses at rich children’s parties.

 

She’s been leered at, cat-called and idolised and she’s decided to do something about it by talking frankly about how it feels to inhabit her body.

 

Dressed in a shiny skin tight body suit she tells us how it feels to be a young woman.

 

She’ll talk about her yeast infections, her moon cup, her nipples and her labia. And she happily lets rip on sweat, farting and poo.

 

Although her show is called ‘Smut’ it’s anything but sexy. In fact Philips announces at the start that she defies anyone to get turned on.

 

She’s tremendously likeable and has some good natured exchanges with the crowd, particularly a man from Croydon who appears to know a lot about sea mammals and a chap in the front row who failed to make it to the loo before the start of the show.

 

She has a couple of awkward moments - suggesting that some of the audience might be Tories - which is highly unlikely in the middle of a Scottish arts festival and at one point saying, “That’s my favourite joke in the show,” which is a habit I dearly hoped had died in the pandemic.

 

But she has a refreshing and original approach to dismantling the myths around female beauty and purity. She’s here to give an alternative to the Disney Princess guide to life.

 

In a way this whole show is about consent.   Phillips does not consent to being seen the way she has been seen throughout her life and she has found an ingenious and clever way of subverting and challenging what people expect of her,

 

Phillips is an interesting new voice.  She’s feminine, feminist, uncompromising and determined that we take her on her own terms.