“I don’t want your opinions printed,” Ashley Storrie says to any potential reviewers in the audience. It’s pretty daunting to be addressed directly by the act, particularly as I’ve already committed to writing this. My apologies to Storrie, though for what it’s worth I was a fan of your take-no-prisoners style of confessional comedy.
I’d love to see more filth from Storrie
And Other Erotica touches on many of Storrie’s successes and failures of life: from her resting face to her sexual conquests, no stone is left unturned. Even in the pre-show audience interaction, Storrie’s more than happy to talk about whatever: I entered the room to the dulcet tones of Storrie advising which photos not to send to people on Grindr. Her observational material is nice and neat, with set pieces blending into one another. Storrie has a nice sense of structure in her show, whilst also being unafraid to riff on a particular anecdote or concept for a while. Yes, some jokes on her rivalry with incredibly preened women feels familiar, but her material on being the daughter of a Protestant and a Catholic in Glasgow has an excellent punch line which proves Storrie has something a little different to her contemporaries. There’s a boldness and unapologetic tone which is incredibly endearing.
A risk when developing a show based around how dumb 50 Shades of Grey and other erotic novels sound is that Storrie could come off as childish in tone. If anything, the set seems a little cleaner and more sensible than it could be. Storrie’s short erotic stories make for neat interludes in her set, rather than the main focus of the show. They’re really funny though, and for that reason it seems a shame that we only get two of Storrie’s seductive tales. Storrie parodies the tropes of the genre with a cheeky suppressed smirk: with plenty of alternate names for the male anatomy, there’s a high hit rate which digs at the genre in a way that everybody can enjoy. I’d love to see more filth from Storrie, and look forward to her next foray into the industry of erotic literature.
