Winding / Unwinding by Denni Turp

In Winding / Unwinding Denni Turp takes the colloquial British cliché “As the actress said to the bishop” and strips away the comic veneer from this classed linguistic commonplace to vividly embody its central character.

The “actress” of British imagination has been a figure for a variety of different—though equally unflattering—classed and gendered assumptions. As with many staples of comic language, it’s not often we interrogate what is bubbling just beneath the surface; the unconscious attitudes and biases our clichés serve to conceal and (occasionally) to betray. Yet Winding / Unwinding sets about just such interrogative work with real imaginative gusto, and Turp’s Actress emerges as equally savvy and tender; ever ready to meet the world with a lively and compassionate intelligence