I'm sat in the King Dome at the Plesance, as agog as my fellow audience members, while Selina Mosinski writhes around in a body suit that has added fake genitalia with replete faux body hair. The nearly-full house is expressing a mixture of shock, awe, and delight. Well, almost everyone. It feels as if two theatregoers thought that they might be coming to see a production of the original Puss in Boots story. I am wondering what they make of it all.
This doesn't sound like the environment for a deep, considered reckoning for the most troubling aspects of the 2000s ladette culture, and yet - for me at least - it is. Many readers might not have heard of Selina Mosinski yet. But they are much more likely to have come into contact with the character that she birthed almost a decade ago. For those not in the know, Sue Tuke is the fictional manager of Sec*hand Chances, a charity shop in Bulwell, Nottingham. Although filmed in 2014, and briefly part of a Sky Arts Christmas Comedy Short that came out in 2017, it was a further three years before the eighteen-episode 'Charity Shop Sue' web series was released on YouTube. But anyone wondering which actress played this wonderfully vile, although complicated, villainess would struggle to find an answer. Searches on Google wondering who she was peaked in November 2021, after the series - and to a greater extent the character itself - had burst into the hun culture canon. 'Sue' has opened Pride events, appeared on television, and done paid promotions for Jet2, Specsavers, New Look, and even Cadbury's. But Mosinski herself was nowhere to be found. At the time, I put this down to a commitment to 'the bit'. It wasn't until 2023 that 'Selina Mosinski' was credited with an appearance in Starstruck and then the BBC hit comedy Alma's Not Normal. Her appearance as Auntie Evie in the latter felt like the turning point for Mosinski as a performer. Had the curtain finally been pulled back?