Rosy Carrick: Musclebound

Confident, provocative and supremely powerful, Rosy Carrick is great at sex. In fact, her onstage career has long been based around her gleeful frankness on the subject. And yet, the sex she’s always been so open about – her sex life with men – is radically different from Rosy’s earliest and most private erotic fantasies, in which the musclebound heroes of movies like Conan and He-Man are publicly tortured and humiliated by their male antagonists, and where, alone with her imagination, sexual power means something very different. Now, newly single, forty and doling out relationship advice to a teenage daughter on the brink of her own first sexual encounter, Rosy is forced to confront the niggling suspicion that something about her sexual past has never felt quite right. Could reconnecting with the hyper-macho desires of her youth be the key to restoring her sexual power in the present? Or is there a more uncomfortable truth waiting to be reckoned with?

Recounting the hilariously obsessive real-life details of Rosy’s quest for sexual fulfilment alongside frank and intimate conversations with her daughter Olive and candid interviews with her childhood heroes Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dolph Lundgren, Musclebound leaps from the niche fetish of one individual woman into an important and long-overdue exploration of power, performance and the politics of pleasure in heterosexual sex, as Rosy is forced to ask herself: what are the sexual lessons we want to pass on to our daughters - and what do we still need to learn for ourselves?

"Perfectly poignant and profound... Musclebound drips with Carrick’s charisma and bursts with originality - an honest story of a woman and her adolescent daughter navigating the world of sex and desire" - The List

★★★★ "A startling, laugh out loud funny and erudite examination of age, relationships and female sexuality" - What’s on Stage

★★★★ "Intelligent, thought-provoking and witty – the whole audience was crying with laughter" - The Voice

★★★★ "Rosy Carrick likes to touch herself" – London Theatre

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This event is part of our Reigning Women programme

Reigning Women is a genre-spanning mini-season of shows and events that are all about celebrating the kick-ass women that are strutting their stuff on the scene at the moment.

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