Female desire, that most elu­sive of quar­ries. We should be chaste, but not prudish. Exper­i­enced, but not too slutty. Up for any­thing. Well, not that. Or that. Maybe just don’t talk about it?

It’s enough to make a girl want to take a vow of cel­ib­acy and retire to a cave with a half-dozen res­cued cats.

Enter Body Double, a new work at BATS that explores the silence, con­tra­dic­tions, joys, and shame around women’s sexu­al­ity and desire. Watch as two straight women explore their own desire in vivid, awk­ward, hil­ari­ous, and mov­ing detail. It’s as though Karin McCrack­en and Julia Croft are mak­ing up for two life­times of being told to shut up with an hour-long show. It’s an emo­tion­al roller­coast­er (much like being a sexu­al woman in mod­ern soci­ety), to say the least.

The stage looks like a clas­sic inter­pret­a­tion of heav­en – all flow­ing white gauze and a fuzzy blanket that begs to be pat­ted – until you notice the floor is covered in plastic tarp, as though ready for the slip­per­i­est of orgies. Vir­gins and whores, indeed.

McCrack­en and Croft move seam­lessly from cringe­worthy tales of dis­astrous hook­ups to secret fantas­ies to rape cul­ture to fak­ing orgasms to the absurdity of media, all bound by an access­ible dis­cus­sion of just how much of our under­stand­ing of female desire is socially con­struc­ted and per­formed. If we want romance and ten­der­ness, it’s because we’re con­di­tioned that way. But if we buck the ste­reo­type, are we just play­ing right into the patriarchy’s hands? Are any of our desires really ours? Does it mat­ter?

While the per­formers are undoubt­ably bril­liant, the show’s use of live video deserves a spe­cial men­tion. You can rev­el in the enthralling tech to dis­tract from the sink­ing real­isa­tion that you might be the unnamed part­ner in that embar­rass­ing reen­act­ment. There’s some­thing com­pel­ling about watch­ing the care­fully cur­ated ver­sion of a scene pro­jec­ted on a screen even as you can see the per­formers in their entirety. Even when we know what we’re exper­i­en­cing is a con­struc­tion, that doesn’t make it any less real.

Without giv­ing away too much, this show com­bines two of my great loves – chick­en and sex. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll cringe in relat­able hor­ror. Truly some­thing for every­one.

If you are a woman or have ever wanted to fuck a woman, you too should see it. If you’ve ever caught your­self intel­lec­tu­al­ising the prob­lem­at­ic-ness of lit­er­ally everything you’ve ever loved, you’ll like Body Double. If you are cur­rently fuck­ing someone (of any gender – let’s be real, we are uni­ver­sally bad at talk­ing about sex), you should see it togeth­er, and then stick around BATS, have a drink, and dis­cuss your own desires.

That’s the only way we ever move for­ward, so kudos to McCrack­en and Croft for giv­ing us so much juicy fod­der for that con­ver­sa­tion.

Body Double is on at BATS until 25 Novem­ber and again at the Auck­land Arts Fest­iv­al at the end of March next year.

All pho­tos by Tabitha Arthur.