Selina Mosinski (Puss in Boots – A Working Class Fairy Tale) – Pleasance Dome

What a free-wheeling frolic. Or, as the 90’s Ladette-obsessed tabloids would’ve had it, a runaway romp. And the answer to the frequently asked question, ‘how did Charity Shop Sue get to the top?’ Or, well, Bulwell.

Led by her ‘unruly undercarriage’ to an insalubrious spot behind the brutalist bike-sheds the ambitious teenage Randy Cain attends to the task of her own deflowering. And a task it indeed resembles given the unsatisfactory effort put in by Daz. Although she isn’t Randy Cain yet, but an aspiring performer wondering how the feck one gets oneself out of Derby’s estate-land to the bright lights of London. Help is at hand; advice and encouragement is dispensed from the screen behind by a (N Conti-masked) fairy godmother Sylvia Young, though the initial dose is little more than astrological, revolving around ‘beware of something yellow’ and the suggestion to look out for the letters G, R, Y and A. Lacking the means or transport to get to London our heroine becomes marooned at the Puss In Boots strip club where she encounters the fabulous cross-eyed chain smoking creation that is Barbara. Who’s quite yellow, by the way.

This show, while delightfully daft and surreally silly is also raw and uncompromising, the most important lesson learned in the above establishment being the price of one’s body parts, specifically the genitals sought by men lacking the access to unlimited bank accounts. There are wigs, dresses, fingerless blow-up dolls of both genders and a sleazy entrepreneur Gary Pasquale. Randy cavorts about in pink bikini bottoms and a football-themed bra but there are some serious threads woven into this partially cautionary tale, not least the appalling dangers of toxic shock syndrome. There are a few technical hiccoughs, Mosinski gliding through the glitches with Panto-style asides, switching between characters with ease and keeping the laughter metre ticking. While a different permutation of the letters Y, G and A come to her rescue, her strip joint colleagues are not all so lucky and it’s a sobering look back at what many at the time thought was an emancipated 90’s.

Running August 5^th – 30^th (no 19^th) https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/selina-mosinski-puss-in-boots-a-working-class-fairy-tale

Reviewer: Roger Jacobs

Reviewed: 24th August 2026

North West End UK / Theatre Muse UK Rating: 4