DENTATA @ The Actors Theatre, Brighton Fringe.

There is a particular kind of performance that you carry home inside your ribcage, not quite digested, not quite gone, lodged somewhere between your funny bone and solar plexus. Julia VanderVeen's DENTATA is that kind of show. Wildly funny, genuinely strange, and pointed as a witch's hatpin, it is the most beguiling, bewildering, and outright odd thing I've seen at this year's Brighton Fringe. So far. But I'd wager that caveat won't be tested.

Let's begin with reclamation, because that is where VanderVeen anchors her show. The witch. The monster. The body itself, the anatomy that polite society has spent centuries either worshipping, legislating, fearing, or laughing away. In DENTATA, all of that accumulated dread and dismissal gets turned inside out through the darkly gleeful French theatrical tradition of Bouffon: a form rooted in grotesque mockery, in the power of the outsider who scoffs back at the powerful. For those unfamiliar, imagine clown stripped of its innocence and given a philosophy degree and a grudge, transgressive, carnivalesque, and feral in the most intoxicating way. VanderVeen doesn't so much perform Bouffon as unleash it. This is not theatre that sits politely in its seat.

Her cast of reclaimed archetypes is magnificent. Linked together with the host character - Betsy - a sweet needy blonde North Carolina wanna-be beauty pageant winner lost in a loveless marriage. A teenage Medusa, awkward, misunderstood, just hoping someone will ask her to prom, lands with both comic perfection and genuine pathos. The Three Weird Sisters of Macbeth get a long-overdue reappraisal, conjured through extraordinary physical discipline and something approaching ritual, feral energy coiling beneath every syllable. A bonkers reworking of Odysses and the Sirens, and at the pinnacle of it all, a giant, operatic vagina puppet. Yes. You read that correctly. Theatrically audacious and somehow as completely right as that sentence sounds. The puppetry, designed by Eva Lansberry turns simple materials into startling imagery. There were moments of pure WTF wonder that had the audience suspended between laughter and awe, not entirely sure which way to fall.

This is a show that knows exactly how to hold a room, which makes it all the more impressive that it also knows how to unsettle one. VanderVeen's connection with her audience is exceptional: warm without being cloying, feral without tipping into alienation. Hypnotic trembling rage with a wink. There's a looseness to her stage presence, a quality of something that hasn't been entirely tamed and isn't pretending to be. And when the props, bless them, decided to pursue their own agenda mid-performance, her improvisational instincts kicked in with such deftness that it was hard to tell where the chaos was planned and where she was simply, brilliantly, flying. The answer, I suspect, is: both.

For queer audiences in particular, DENTATA speaks in a register we know deeply, the reclamation of bodies and identities that have been pathologised, mythologised, made monstrous by those who feared them. Medusa doesn't need your sympathy; she needs her own story back. The Weird Sisters aren't cautionary figures; they're a coven. The anatomy that gives the show its name has been weaponised against women and queer bodies alike for centuries; VanderVeen plants her flag in it and sings. There is something profoundly political in refusing to be domesticated, in insisting that the feral self, the excessive self, the self that takes up too much room and makes too much noise, is not a problem to be managed but a force to be celebrated. In a political moment where women's bodily autonomy is being dismantled with alarming legislative efficiency, and where queer existence is once again being framed as threatening and dangerous, DENTATA feels like a war cry dressed in a clown's costume.

The production is leanly constructed, VanderVeen, an award-winning performer who made her name in New York and now works from Amsterdam, brings a decade of accumulated rigour and wildness to a show that feels both deeply personal and fiercely universal.

DENTATA is daft in the most beguiling sense of the word, disturbing in the ways that linger, and frequently so funny it shortcircuits your better judgement entirely. This is real laugh out loud funny. It is feral in the way that the best fringe theatre always is, uncontained, alive, and unbothered by your discomfort. Exactly the kind of ferocious, strange, necessary work that Brighton was made for and adores.

DENTATA: Tonight, May20th @ The Actors Theatre, 4 Prince's Street. Tickets from £10 at brightonfringe.org. Age 18+. Contains strong language, nudity, audience interaction, and strobe lighting.

More info or to book see the Fringe Website here: