‘Like a fly on poo, I can’t stop making art about sex and sexual shame,’ says Rosa Garland over a Zoom chat with Metro, ahead of her gloriously stupid and side-splittingly funny Edinburgh Fringe show, Primal Bog.
If you happen across Rosa’s show in August, you will find her butt naked rolling around in gunk, getting mucky with real-life worms, peeing into a cup, and even getting an actual tattoo every night on stage.
‘These moments are not there for the sake of being shocking,’ she says. ‘It’s actually trying to break down a barrier between me and the audience, rather than build one.’
While the Edinburgh Fringe is made up of many stand-up comedians, it’s also home to an incredible array of clowns. Sometimes the crossover is a confusing one: where nakedness is a baseline in Rosa’s world, in mainstream comedy it’s seen as avant-garde.
‘I’ve completely lost my measure of what’s shocking and what’s not,’ laughs Rosa, adding: ‘In live art what I do is tame… Like, there’s no bloodletting.’
Primal Bog – a phrase taken from an Esther Perel book – is somewhere deep in all of us that’s murky, beautiful, messy and gross in equal parts. It’s the ugly, taboo desires: the kinks we all have but don’t talk about.
That’s what Rosa’s interested in. ‘The grossness is sort of metaphorical about how like kink is seen as gross,’ she explains.
For Rosa, Primal Bog is an exploration of her queerness, too.
‘My journey was pretty much about thinking I was really wrong, really gross, really bad. It took a long time to come out,’ she says. ‘There was also a lot of compulsory heterosexuality going on, and just feeling like I was in the wrong place all the time, and doing the wrong thing.
‘So for me, these monstery, grotesque aesthetics are me going: “Well, I’m gonna eat all that s**t that I’ve absorbed all those years, all those ideas, and I’m gonna s**t them back out at you, and it will be strangely beautiful.’
But at its core, the show is a collection of things Rosa likes to do.
‘As a clown if you can’t see pleasure in what you’re doing and the games you’re playing on stage, then it’s not fun to watch,’ she explains. ‘I like running around naked like a toddler. I like playing with slime, and I like tattoo pain.’
Yes, the tattoos are permanent – and Rosa is getting one every night on stage in August. (Now might be a good time to add that Rosa’s show is inspired by Jackass.)
‘I’m happy to give up my left leg to this show and this idea, I think it’s funny’ she says.
Rosa Garland’s Primal Bog review – ★★★★★
Primal Bog sounds like shock-value theatre. But it’s really so much more than that.
The off-beat character Rosa creates on stage gives us a little glimpse of her taboo desires, but with hesitation and lots of worried looks to the audience.
By the end of the show, Rosa is acting out on all her fantasies, with the crowd cheering her on. It’s genuinely inspiring when she pours a jug of her own pee over her head at the end of the show.
Wait. How did we get here…?
Rosa’s clowning is world-class, and the audience – in the palm of her slimy hand – will follow her anywhere. She takes us bit by bit into her messy psyche with just one hilarious eye movement, gesture, or comment at a time. She says everything by doing next to nothing: it’s an irresistable masterclass in comedy.
Such is her genius, Rosa is captivating to watch, even when she’s just lying on the floor naked covered in slime talking absolute nonesense. Audience members craned their necks so not to miss just a subtle gesture that will take them further into her uproarious bog.
Rosa is belly-laugh funny, it seems without even trying (though of course, her character is expertly crafted and each beat meticulously honed).
Primal Bog is an example of what a Fringe show should be: endlessly playful, ridiculous but totally coherent, bold and unflinching. Rosa’s greatest talent? She is a master of play.
Somehow, by the end of the show the audience is well and truly in Rosa’s Primal Bog with her.
She got a standing ovation: it was more than well-deserved. Rosa Garland is a supernova talent, and Primal Bog is the funniest – while being the most natural and least try-hard – show I’ve seen at the Edinburgh Fringe so far.
But there’s also a deeper meaning.
‘The show costs me something,’ Rosa adds, explaining how it’s risky and vulnerable to go into The Bog. It’s also life-altering.
‘I wanted to show that I’m allowing myself to be permanently altered by this experience, but also that me and the audience have made a beautiful space together,’ she says.
In order to urinate on stage – which is the most obvious nod to a kink in the show – Rosa must drink a whole load of water and have her last pee an hour before showtime.
‘It’s gonna keep me very hydrated in Edinburgh. By the time the wee comes out, it’s clear,’ she laughs.
How does it feel, I ask, to be doing something so vulnerable on stage? I was expecting some chat about how liberating it is. But no.
‘Very relieving by the time I get there. I don’t have time to overthink the show before I go on, because I’m too busy holding a wee,’ she says.
Rosa does see outside her clown-tinted glasses on occasions, like when her friends come to see her show, and say how cool it is.
‘I do get reminders periodically that in the mainstream our society is still very sex negative, homophobic, and definitely anti-kink,’ she says.
‘I live in such a nice queer, liberated bubble. But getting those reminders makes me be like, “Oh, it’s still kind of radical to be butt naked in a way that isn’t inviting any kind of sexual gaze from anyone.”‘
Rosa’s work is so anti-male gaze, she doesn’t feel the weight of womens’ bodies being historically and systematically sexualised while on stage. She’s not vulnerable to that well-worn reality in Primal Bog.
‘What I do on stage is so unsexual, it’s so weird and gross,’ Rosa says.
‘I’ve had groups of lads walk out of my shows before, because I think they see the poster, and they’re like, “Okay, naked lass!” and then in 10 minutes, I was honking, covered in salad cream, and they’re kind of like, okay….,’ Rosa recalls from her show Trash Salad last year.
‘What I’m doing is so actively anti-creep that most of them filter themselves out,’ she laughs.
But while Rosa is used to performing in safe, queer spaces, The Edinburgh Fringe is a melting pot of audience members. Some may just go to Rosa’s show thinking it’s a straight up comedy. Yikes.
‘Who knows what will happen?’ says Rosa. ‘I did definitely learn from Trash Salad last time that I do need some security in place to make sure if something does happen, I can kick them out.’
Nudity is vulnerable when not everyone respects it, of course. But it doesn’t faze Rosa.
‘It’s not a part of the show that freaks me out. I like the relationship to my body I have on stage. It’s a tool for comedy. Boobs are really funny. You know, having a tampon string is funny,’ she says.
Oh, and she also shares the stage with live worms – pets she genuinely seems to adore, like a middle-class family might a cockerpoo.
‘I’ve got them in the fridge if you want to see them..?’ she asks, eyes lit up. ‘We think of them as gross, but they’re actually just really cute, and they just want to wriggle around.’
Worms are a physical manifestation of the Primal Bog. Alive, wriggling, and frowned upon.
But forget all that. Primal Bog is not just some Tate Modern chin-scratching live art.
‘It’s really stupid,’ Rosa laughs. ‘I talk a big game about my ideas, and you’ll see it, and it’s really silly. The tone is comedy, it’s clown, it’s an idiot on stage trying to navigate this world.’
But Rosa can’t help but wonder: ‘Don’t we all feel this weird on the inside?’
See Rosa Garland’s Primal Bog at Assembly Roxy: Downstairs every night at 9.50pm from July 31 to August 24. Tickets here.
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