Jessie Cave walks on to the stage as if by accident, blinking behind large spectacles covering half a face framed by long plaited pigtails. To signify her arrival, a dark drum and base tune reverberates. The audience titters at the strange contrast. Cave smiles with us, knowing it is the first of many, in her brutally honest portrayal of a young woman navigating heartbreak and motherhood in the digital age.
Jessie Cave redefines pillow talk in this comedic confessional.
Enclosing herself in a child’s play pen, which to the untrained eye looks an awful lot like a cage, she holds a large pillow, on which is embroidered the face of the father of her children. ‘Have you had sex with anyone since we broke up’? She asks him. This is the beginning of several devastatingly intimate, funny and embarrassing conversations Cave amassed in the wake of a separation from partner and stand-up comedian, Alfie Brown. Redefining pillow talk, Cave conducts a part-comedic part-confessional, leaving no mortifying stone unturned, no Instagram un-stalked.
Cave’s impeccable sense of comedic timing allows her to produce a narrative that glides and lands anywhere from awkward tinder dates, the trials of motherhood, to having sex in a utility cupboard at a Harry Potter convention. The candid tone of Cave’s performance allows her to speak of sexual assault, begging for someone who doesn’t want you and looking at your vagina in the mirror in the same breath, knowing when to apply the pressure and when to let the dialogue breathe back into an easy laugh.
What makes Cave’s performance special is her indomitably relatable representation of what it means to fall in and out of love in the age of social media. To see your loves new partner on your ‘people you might like to follow’. The irresistible torture of being able to look at them for hours, gauging through this shallow veneer what they have that you lack. She balances a genuinely funny self-deference, with the injustice of being unfairly dismissed. As a new mother she reflects how it feels to be pregnant 18 months out of a 2-year relationship, and having to negotiate who you are, whilst you’re being redefined as a mother.
It was not a polished performance – several times Cave tripped over her words and darted off stage to compose herself. She often paused to turn her back on the audience to giggle at her own story, or to compose herself as she reflected out loud ‘that really did hurt my feelings, actually.’ If any of this conduced an air that she was nervous or had messed up some dialogue, it didn’t matter. She’d earned an audience that had decided they were going to root for her no matter what – and when the show finished and she skittered out of sight, the crowd rose to a standing ovation anyway.
