Pleasure Little Treasure is the name of a song by Depeche Mode, the favourite band of Elina Alminas’s estranged father. As she grew up, they also became her favourite; a link to the parent she never knew and, perhaps, a link to a past weighed down with troubled versions of masculinity.
As warped family backgrounds go, hers is rivalled only by that of Jamie Morton of My Dad Wrote a Porno fame. Born in Tallin in 1991, Alminas was a toddler when her grandmother opened the White Lion, Estonia’s first strip club. Her mother, working as a bartender, would shield her little girl’s eyes from the punters and leave her to do her homework backstage with the dancers, a “matriarchal society” in microcosm. The company of women was more reassuring than the extortion and exploitation front of house.
The Gaulier-trained writer-performer has a lot to say on this and, even if it is more than a one-person show can comfortably contain, she makes thoughtful connections between mafia bullies, inconstant men and domestic abusers, tracing the line of boorish male behaviour all the way up to Vladimir Putin.
If such behaviour is nothing new, it was given legitimacy, she would argue, by political circumstance. Comparing the Soviet Union flag with the logo of McDonald’s – only a hammer to distinguish one fiery red symbol from the other – she describes how the collapse of communism ushered in fast food, fast sex and a generation of free-market thugs who continue to hold sway today. Less the victory of democracy, it was more the green light for toxic masculinity.
This is surely not the last we’ll hear from Alminas on a topic worthy of fuller dramatisation, but in the meantime, she fashions a jolly and forthright show, complete with costume changes, lip-syncing and video, not to mention creepy cross-dressing.
Pleasure Little Treasure is at the Underbelly Cowgate, Edinburgh, until 13 August.
