For an artist who relishes clown’s playfulness (even the red nose makes a triumphant appearance), Betty Grumble engages with complex ideas and dangerous emotions. Variously celebrating the work of earlier artists, most trenchantly Annie Sprinkle’s eco-sexuality, she revives the ghost of her own previous incarnations and explores the emotional impact of being a witness in the justice system. Grumble’s generosity to the audience and her co-creators places Enemies Of Grooviness Eat Shit between raw performance art, exorcism and anarchic physical comedy. Grumble fights oppression with laughter and intensity. 

Past routines are recycled (the vagina painting, aerobic work-out, extravagant and symbolic application of make-up) while she integrates new elements of songs, poems and magical ritual to push her vaudeville aesthetic towards a cathartic intensity. There is an undercurrent of righteous anger, and a coherent critique of the patriarchal systems that oppress, but her collaging of styles discovers surprising ways to ground frustration and convert negativity into a healthy and sex-positive performance. 

As in Sex Clown, Grumble inhabits a vibrant sexuality, placing erotic tropes at the service of a feminist liberation, and she takes the provocation of live art (masturbating onstage and appearing to eat shit) and leavens it with good humour and outrageous comedy. The show’s structure lurches from orgasmic bliss to distressed polemic, slowly emerging from grief and outrage into an immediate and joyful celebration of the body. Unashamed and vulnerable, Betty Grumble finds the connection between New Age spirituality and an absurdist celebration of theatrical mayhem.

Betty Grumble: Enemies Of Grooviness Eat Shit, Assembly Roxy, until 24 August, 9.15pm.