 Performance artist and sex clown Betty Grumble has long been a cult figure at the Fringe, but this feels like the show that has fully broken her out. The one that has taken her from underground notoriety to genuine word-of-mouth phenomenon. Part of the hype, of course, comes from headlines promising a woman who will masturbate onstage, eat shit, and push boundaries in the most outrageous ways imaginable. But what those headlines miss and what this performance makes undeniable is that Grumble is far less interested in provocation for its own sake than in building an atmosphere of shared release, solidarity, and radical joy.
From the moment we entered the sold-out venue, each of us given a homemade maraca to join in as we pleased, the audience was no longer passive spectators but supporters in what will unfold. As people filter in Betty has already appeared in a gloriously exposed outfit, dancing with a chaotic and uncontainable energy generated a buzz in the room. What followed cannot be neatly catalogued and to do so would be to flatten a show that thrives on surprise, ritual, and emotional whiplash. It’s less a sequence of acts than a journey, one that leaves you exhilarated, unsettled perhaps, and profoundly moved. At its core, the show is powered by Betty’s personal history. She recounts her own experience in the court system after pursuing legal action for abuse. Like so many women before her, she was dismissed, belittled, labelled “vengeful” rather than believed. That injustice burns at the heart of her work, surfacing in acts that oscillate between rage, grief, and ecstatic defiance. But what could be isolating trauma becomes, in Betty’s hands, a collective act of healing. The fury is real, but so too is the tenderness, the shared laughs and the communal catharsis. This is where Betty’s genius lies: she transforms an audience into a community. We dance and sing with her, paint her face with warrior markings, and shake our maracas in solidarity. The sexual acts of the show are never about cheap titillation; they are reconfigured into weapons of resistance and survival, with the crowd complicit in their power. In that sense, Grumble’s performance is less about shocking us and more about gathering us and showing how art can make strangers into allies. Supporting her is Craig, a multi-instrumentalist whose bass and keyboards provide an emotional undercurrent for Betty’s onstage storms. While Craig remains mostly silent, their presence is deeply felt; the dialogue between Betty’s body and Craig’s music is wordless but electric, a partnership that frames and heightens the performance. What makes this show unforgettable is not just Betty Grumble’s fearlessness, but the way she manages to fold her audience into that fearlessness and making us part of a ritual that feels at once absurd, raw, and oddly sacred. You leave not just having witnessed a performance, but having taken part in one. And in the process, Betty reminds us that outrage, grief, and joy are not just individual emotions but collective forces, capable of reshaping how we experience art, and perhaps we can even change the world. Lee Hutchison 5/5 Betty Grumble's Enemies of Grooviness Eat Sh!t Venue: Upstairs at Assembly Roxy Dates: August 18-24 (excluding 19th) Time: 2115 Tickets: www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/betty-grumble-s-enemies-of-grooviness-eat-sh-t |
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