Clementine 2
Performer: Rosalie Minnitt
Venue: Beside at Pleasance Courtyard
Date and time: Thursday 20th August, 3:35pm
Ticket price: £16.50
Reviewed by: Sarah Turnbull
Rating: ★★★★ 4/5
Rosalie Minnitt’s cult heroine returns in Clementine 2, and the collision she engineers between Regency romance and contemporary chaos is gloriously, ferociously funny. You needn’t have seen last year’s chapter; this instalment stands alone, greeting newcomers with a bang (and a curtsy) before racing headlong into an hour of feral, fizzy theatre that feels like a whip-smart sugar rush of feminist mischief through meme culture and musical theatre.
Minnitt bounds onstage in candy-pink, Regency-meets-streetwear, beaming and radiating an elastic, clownish physicality that never dips. The character’s first principles are deliciously wrong-headed: “Sorry I haven’t written of late – I’ve been illiterate,” she chirps. The whole thing positively zings with Vitamin C – apt for a heroine named Clementine, whose citrus tang sharpens the show’s bite.
A brisk video prologue skewers modern puffed-up misogyny, slyly teeing up Clementine’s “origin story” – the birth of her own brand of feminism, if not quite the movement itself.
From there, Minnitt builds a world in real time and invites the room to live in it. Audience members become confidantes (Constance, Verity and the irresistibly wayward Chastity), rivals and even royalty; a crowned “king” meets whatever death scene he deems appropriate. Minnitt’s eye contact is unwavering and her laughter infectious. She folds participants into the narrative with such confidence that the crowd’s choices feel like pre-planned payoffs.
There’s a musical-theatre medley that gleefully lampoons every earnest Broadway belt you’ve ever heard and a wicked subversion of the Disney princess trope: this heroine communes with animals, but they can’t talk back. The script fires off rapid references that land particularly well with the Millennials and Gen Xers in the audience. Mean Girls snark pairs with Heathers darkness; Austen-ish mannerliness is trampled by influencer logic. Clementine thinks she’s a cosmopolitan sophisticate; the comedy blooms in the yawning gap between that delusion and reality.
The show is booby-trapped with gags. Jokes are planted early and pay off when you least expect them, and props you barely notice later drop from the ceiling.
Clementine 2’s real magic is immersion: for an hour, Minnitt builds a sandbox and the whole room piles in. She even clocks it from the stage: “Wow, you’re really into the world-building.”
It isn’t just crowd work; it’s collective make-believe – the kind you haven’t surrendered to since childhood afternoons when a pile of cushions became a castle and a tablecloth a cape. The show gives you permission to be gloriously daft again: to giggle, to overact, to say yes.
Embrace the silly, lean into the imagination and let this pink, citrus-bright universe carry you along. You don’t watch Clementine 2 so much as play it.
★★★★
