Hot on the heels of another show about “fuckboys” in the same theatre, Australian standup Brodi Snook’s set likewise lifts the lid on malign male behaviour on the dating scene. She’s been performing the show since 2019, but the problems it elucidates – specifically, a campaign of harassment against Snook by an unnamed male comedian – are, legally at least, not yet resolved.
The show takes a while to build up to that revelation, snaking its way through the 30-year-old’s sexual and not-so-romantic history, and the rackety life she leads. The crowd is small tonight, which can leave the jokes – heavily sardonic cracks about mercy dating and menstruating into KeepCups – feeling exposed, and a bit too scripted. But Snook gets us on side with a routine about her “white girl hangover checklist”, and an appalling questionnaire she’s invited to complete by a would-be date on the Bumble app. We also meet the new age beau who advises Snook to unblock her chakras – and whom we can thank for the show’s title, Handful, a term he applies to our host by way of negging her into bed.
You might find, as I did, the supposed dysfunction of Snook’s life, as she pulls one memory after another out of a box marked “Every fucked thing I’ve ever thought, said or done”, a little overegged. Her general attitude, too, is cynical, as keep-fit enthusiasts, political activists, friends who hold baby showers and – worst of all – men who claim to be feminist, wilt under Snook’s scorn.
It’s a cynicism with which her female audience may sympathise most keenly, but that even I can see is justified by the procession of bad men to whom she is fatally drawn. Might some in-app review function – “dick adviser,” she calls it – help rein in their excesses? Even that couldn’t save Snook from the likes of her celebrated harasser, whose attention, as she describes it here, drove her to seclusion, confusion and fear. It’s an awful tale, that sounds a bassnote of alarm under this otherwise caustic comedy of depressing dates and stunted self-esteem.
• At Soho theatre, London, until 18 June.
