Verona Verbakel's OnlyFans for Therapy: Edinburgh Review — SkimNews
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- Verona Verbakel estimates she would need 2,599 psychiatric sessions at £70 each to fund a lifetime of trauma recovery, a cost her new solo show uses as its starting premise.
- "OnlyFans for Therapy" follows a woman haunted by abuse suffered at age five and the further anguish of an investigation at 18, with Verbakel alternating between confident and crumbling on screen.
- Karolien De Bleser directs the show as part of the Big in Belgium programme, with Verbakel seated stony-faced at a laptop playing first-person videos that range from a drily comic list of emotional triggers to on-location breakdowns at the site of the original abuse.
- Verbakel's videos vary from upbeat to tearful, including scenes of her lying in bed wearing a sleep mask, making the "direct-to-camera honesty of the online world" intensify the pain in what the review calls a "brave, unsettling show."
- "OnlyFans for Therapy" runs at Zoo Playground, Edinburgh, until 30 August as part of the Edinburgh festival.
Why it matters: The show reframes the creator-economy format — usually associated with intimacy-for-cash — as a vehicle for raw trauma disclosure, and Verbakel's £70-per-session, 2,599-session back-of-envelope calculation frames therapy access as an economic as well as emotional problem. For audiences, it offers a Belgian-imported alternative model of online confessional content; for Verbakel, the Edinburgh stage becomes a stand-in for the paid platform she says she cannot actually afford.
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