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

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.

Her sneering representations of these characters instruct us to see them (whether we want to or not) as Irina does: pathetic and deeply undesirable. It’s uncomfortable. Irina is a narcissist which is enforced, immediately, by the opening scene: a huge video showing close-ups of her tear-streaked face set to haunting, slow music. The credits roll. Her name flashes up as the director, cinematographer, art director and everything else.

There was a buzz around the production before it ever made it to the stage.