Review: Chelsea Birkby

Chelsea Birkby’s one of the top 0.1% Cheeky Girls listeners on her music streaming service and it’s all in service of her mental health. She consumes novelty 90s pop first thing in the morning to perk herself up, which explains both why her boyfriend associates depressive episodes with Vengaboys, and why she spends a lot of time wondering if the S in S Club 7 stands for “sex”.

In this intelligently written and paced show, the award-winning comic and writer talks about navigating her bipolar disorder, tries to unpick the complexities of sexual objectification, considers the nature of sexual shame and expresses her fears about desires evolving into mania.

She blends pop culture references with learnings from Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus (she’s to be applauded for finding common ground between the existentialist’s tome and the leaked sexts of Maroon 5’s Adam Levine), quotes from Lady Chatterley’s Lover and insight she’s gleaned from the nudes at London’s National Gallery and the literary canon of Kim Kardashian.

Birkby's slightly shy, dork-adjacent stage persona belies the mischief within, and while this is more of a quiet chuckle than belly laugh affair, This Is Life, Cheeky Cheeky is an enriching hour.