By Neil Durham

WORTH A LOOK?: *****

WHEN? Saturday 19 April (matinee), runs through 20 April 2025 Tickets for autumn gigs

Setlist: I Do And I Don’t Care; Mother; Lies; 69; You Forever; Logic Bitch; Prioritise Pleasure; Fucking Wizardry; The Curse; In Plain Sight; What Now; Cheers To Me; If Not Now, It’s Soon; Focus Is Power; I Do This All The Time; The Deep Blue Okay

Self Esteem urges us to keep our cameraphones on, ignore the ‘dusty old pervert vibes’ of this esteemed West End theatre and to get up out of our seats and dance if we want to.

• Read on for reasons including why this is our favourite gig of the year so far and A Complicated Woman deserves to be number 1

Emboldened by a triumphant West End debut in Cabaret at The Kit Kat Club at the Playhouse Theatre, Rotherham-born Rebecca Lucy Taylor has joined forces with the show’s Olivier Award-winning designer Tom Scutt (Pet Shop Boys Dreamworld) to produce a visually striking show to launch her 3rd album A Complicated Woman out Friday (25 April 2025).

She’s perhaps best known as pop star Self Esteem for last album Prioritise Pleasure, in 2021 an album of the month for us and explains it stalled at number 11 and she would love for its follow up to go top 10.

The show starts with its red curtain raised by a quarter of its length and Taylor dressed as if a member of the cast of The Handmaid’s Tale with her 10-strong predominantly female dance troupe and choir kitted out similarly.

They dance and the vibe becomes more like The Crucible as the dancers contort their bodies as if speaking in tongues. Taylor explains the costume choice in a recent Times interview: ‘It’s my nod to women being hanged for having opinions,” she says. ‘History has no empathy for everything women go through. I’ll always scream about that.’

We’re in the 5th row and, despite Self Esteem’s invitation, those around us don’t appear to be getting to their feet and thumbing their nose at theatre etiquette which we find especially difficult observing during our song of the month for April, new single 69, which is sexually charged and an absolute, ahem, banger.

The religious uniforms are discarded and replaced by sports kit with each singer/dancer’s surname on the back and older songs Prioritise Pleasure and Fucking Wizardry do persuade the audience, which we would guess is 80% female, to its feet.

Taylor is pro-women yet it would be wrong to describe her as political without acknowledging what a sense of humour she has and the main picture above shows her dancing with 2 inflatables to an absolute bop called Cheers To Me which she wants to see go viral on Tik Tok.

It’s a song we’ve never heard heard before but we’re out of our seats and dancing to it because it’s an absolute earworm. We’re expecting it will be number 1 all summer.

We often cry at theatre but rarely at gigs but do so during penultimate song I Do This All The Time because it’s the song that broke her and much that it exposes has yet to be resolved.

It’s a matinee gig of a show we expect to be reproduced in as close as possible to this 75-minute expression of the importance of community rather than the individual at festivals across the world this summer.

And, as the cast conga off to Shirley Bassey, we reflect that this is our favourite gig of the year so far, Taylor just broke all theatre’s rules and A Complicated Woman deserves to top the album charts a week Friday.

• Main pictures via Facebook courtesy Self Esteem Tickets
• Have you seen a Self Esteem show before and what did you think of this 1? Let us know what you thought in the comments below
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