CAN’T GET PERFECT SHOW FOR RACHEL OUT OF MY HEAD

This time last year we were preparing to rehearse for the Perfect Show For Rachel tour.

Sophie Woolley, Associate Artist with Zoo Co, has been reflecting on why Perfect Show for Rachel has such sticking power.

Why is Perfect Show for Rachel a show you can keep seeing again and again and why does it keep getting better, how does it avoid the theatrical law of diminishing returns, and the performers getting lazy and throwing it away?

Why do I love going to see it again and again and again?

As an occasional dramaturg at Zoo Co (and their artistic associate), I’m aware, as a rule I have to understand and champion the writer, their vision, and be a connector between the director and the writer in the later stages. But my role is not always about that with Zoo Co as they use Open Space, a very non-hierarchical process. I think my role is what I’m doing in this blog. I ask questions, but also being the audience. I get REALLY into being an audience for this show.  

The role I originally envisaged for myself in this production was sweeping the floor. I saw the show in 2022 at the Barbican as an ordinary audience member, drawn to it by the director being learning disabled and on stage herself, by the concept - the jeopardy of the actors not knowing what comes next, and also the casting  - namely Stephen Collins who is one of my favourite actors of all time, his comedy, his emotional depth and range, his improvisational skill). I said to many friends after I saw the show, I would love to work on that show, and that I would sweep the floor, anything just to be involved. 

A year later, my passive manifesting paid off, and I was asked to do some days as a dramaturg. 

At first one of my tasks was to make sure the scenes, could be understood by someone like me (as a Deaf person who uses captions and BSL). There are different uses of scripted captions, and scribed live text, to record Rachel’s ad libs and instructions. There are actors signing either full BSL or SSE. This is different to BSL consultancy which I never do. Zoo Co employs BSL consultants as well as dramaturgs. I’m more about story and structure.  On later dramaturgy visits, I got more into noticing and asking questions. 

Another thing I am currently mindful about as a dramaturg is when I start projecting  ‘too much’ of my own life experience onto the writer’s writing – in this case it would be the actors improvising live.  To an extent, dramaturgs are supposed to be more objective. 

But I do wonder about that, because that’s the point of good live, improvised performance, allowing the audience to project their own stories so that they feel agency so that it feels alive and authentic for them. Rather than it feeling like a bunch of tropes or, worse, journalistic. 

It’s fascinating for example, to tell Flo what I saw her do on stage with Rachel and then hear what she was leaning in to at the time. It’s good for me to know what’s going on for the cast and director who write the show live each time, and notice what I’m feeling and seeing when I watch it. 

So why does Perfect Show for Rachel keep getting better (not more boring like other big shows)? 

With the tour, I saw the show at the beginning of the new tour in 2025 and then again mid-point. It was a totally different and even better experience because the actors were more comfortable, more amazing, but not complacent. It was incredible. As well as the cast and Rachel’s comedy talent and skill, it must because of the improvisational methods they use. The more the actors invest themselves fully, the more present they are in the reality they’re experiencing onstage, the more the audience buy into it.

One of the things that pulls me back to the show is the musical numbers. I love the songs and the dance routines are gorgeous. I project all my own stuff onto Stephen Collins playing Kylie. His performance of that song is beautiful.  I also love the Zoo Co choreographer, Simeon Campbell doing it, when he understudies. 

The Kylie song, Can’t Get you out of My Head is one of the last pop songs (2001) I remembered enjoying, before I went totally deaf. (I got implanted in 2013 mind you, so I can hear Kylie again). That pop song and the video was one of the greatest pop moments of all time. And that cultural bomb went off at the same time it was becoming impossible for me to enjoy it anymore. 

The last time I heard the Kylie song was when I was watching a fashionable glam rock band (Earl Brutus). The actual band was a blur of meaningless, distorted noise to my now very deaf ears. So, my tinnitus, or my mind, for one reason or another, decided to supplant the glam rock band’s noise with Kylie’s can’t Get You Out of My Head. 

Kylie is always there for us. And we can always be her and love her. In Perfect Show for Rachel, Stephen Collins, enacts our desires around Kylie in that video, and of being Kylie ourselves. 

Stephen, backed by his backing dancers, fully invests in and delivers on the mind-blowing sexiness of that video dance routine. For me and I’m sure the rest of the audience, in his glossy blond wig, t shirt and jeans, he lifts the show into the realm of dazzling, choreographed, West End Musical euphoria.   

Stephen is also Deaf, and it’s another aspect to me that a Deaf performer is Kylie, so that I can be even more Kylie myself, and remember more of my own things about Kylie and my past. 

A lot happens for me watching that routine. I love sitting inside all of that, every time I watch it. Although I know it means something else for, well everyone else. 

And sometimes, an audience might not even get to see Kylie in the show they attend, because Rachel decides what goes in each show as she goes along. 

Rachel does what she wants, and I notice she talks a lot more than in the original tour, throwing in more provocations and more obstacles for her cast to deal with, raising the stakes more and more for the cast. This is another reason to keep going back. It’s like a soap opera of a family you aspire to be in, to be like.

I haven’t written nearly enough about the rest of the cast and director.  But as we say in Zoo Co rehearsals, what I’ve written here is “what’s alive in me today”.   Like the Kylie song and dance routine, I can’t get Perfect Show for Rachel Out of My Head. 

Written by Sophie Woolley, Associate Artist with Zoo Co.