19/08/24

Assembly Rooms (Drawing Room), George Street, Edinburgh

In any given year at the Fringe you’ll find a varied assortment of monologues on offer – some comic, some tragic, some wildly entertaining – but there are others that hit you like a ton of lead, leading you to question and reassess your own long-held beliefs about a specific subject. 

Michaela Burger’s The State of Grace covers all of these bases but mostly belongs in the final category.

The words we hear in this show are not Burger’s, but those of Pippa O’Sullivan – or as she became more widely known around the world, Grace Bellavue, an Adelaide-based sex worker, who was also a writer and influencer. Bellavue struggled with bipolar and PTSD for much of her life, before committing suicide in 2015 at the age of 28.

Bellavue’s mother subsequently entrusted Burger with a whole stack of her late daughter’s writings and even some of her favourite belongings. Burger has used them to create this fascinating show.

When she first walks out onto the small stage of the Drawing Room, Burger is simply herself, but she steps effortlessly into her alter ego and leads the audience deeper into Bellavue’s world.  It’s not so much an impersonation as a transformation. She talks eloquently and provocatively about the lives of sex workers, explaining why there is a need for their business to be recognised and decriminalised, pointing out the dangers inherent in the present system, and the ways in which those who work in the trade are denigrated and discriminated against.

And if this sounds like you’re going to be heading into a po-faced sermon, think again, because it’s performed with wit and nuance and, every so often, Burger sings some of Bellavue’s lyrics, using a loop pedal to overlay her own voice to create ethereal harmonies that seem to shimmer like aural mirages. I love the simple but effective staging here, where a couple of neon rectangles don’t just create a nightclub vibe, but are also used to suggest doorways, portals, a shower cubicle, even a bath into which a reluctant cat is plunged and scrubbed clean. 

And whenever you think you’ve got the measure of the piece, it twists in another new direction, giving fresh food for thought, breaking down the barriers that I’ve carried around in my head for years. In this astonishing, multi-faceted role, Burger is quite simply mesmerising. 

There are only a few more chances to see The State of Grace and, as I have occasionally observed before in week three of the Fringe, I wish I’d seen this earlier in the run, so I could try to coax even more people to see it before it packs its bags and heads back to Australia. 

No ifs or buts. This is a must-see.

5 stars

Philip Caveney