Nine Sixteenths at Brixton House Review: A Bold Reckoning with the Janet Jackson Super Bowl Scandal
Nine Sixteenths, the bold multimedia theatre piece created by Paula Varjack about Janet Jackson‘s 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, returns to Brixton House for a second London run and is an incredibly important step in the right direction for live performance art.
The title refers to the nine-sixteenths of a second during which Janet Jackson’s breast was exposed on live American television after Justin Timberlake tore her costume on stage. What followed was a media firestorm that derailed Jackson’s career while leaving Timberlake’s intact.
Two decades on, Varjack and her collaborators turn that moment under the microscope and use it to interrogate misogyny, race, celebrity culture and the long shadow of cancel culture before that phrase even existed.
A Bold Multimedia Performance
Structured in three acts titled The Malfunction, The Aftermath and Reclamation, the 80-minute piece moves between vignettes, personal monologues, dance, lip-sync, puppetry, spoken word and video.
It is the kind of devised, hybrid theatre that could easily collapse into chaos in less assured hands, but director Emily Aboud keeps a firm grip on the tone and the pacing (although it begins to drag on). The result is sharp, often very funny, and emotionally weightier than its playful surface suggests.
A Black Female-Led Ensemble
The piece is led by an all-female cast and creative team.
Paula Varjack performs alongside choreographer and theatre-maker Pauline Mayers, choreographer Julienne Doko, performer Chia Phoenix and BSL performer Vinessa Brant, whose integrated signing is woven into the choreography rather than tacked on, making this one of the most genuinely accessible productions currently in London.
Each performer brings a distinct vocabulary to the stage. Varjack anchors the piece with a journalistic clarity. Mayers and Doko provide its physical engine. Phoenix lands many of the show’s biggest laughs and its most affecting moments of stillness. Brant’s signing is consistently expressive enough that hearing audiences end up watching her too.
Noughties nostalgia that is poignant but falls flat
Alicia Jane Turner’s sound design moves fluidly between early noughties pop, news clips and original underscore, dropping the audience back into the cultural soup of the period without ever leaning on cheap nostalgia.
Christopher Harrison’s video work was interesting but I wanted to see visuals of the long television interview moments that were lip-synced on stage.
Shahaf Beer’s costumes were quite basic and out of a GCSE dressing up box but this isn’t a multi-million-pound West End show so it didn’t really matter.
What Nine Sixteenths Gets Right and Wrong
Where the piece truly succeeds is in its refusal to position Janet Jackson as a victim to be pitied. Instead, Nine Sixteenths reframes her as the subject of a structural injustice that played out in real time on the world’s biggest stage, and uses her story to ask wider questions about who gets believed, who gets blamed and who gets to come back.
It is angry without being humourless, righteous without being preachy, and personal without being self-indulgent.
The all-female, all-Black cast of women over forty is commendable to see in a show that talks about how women are so often forgotten by the entertainment world once they reach a certain age. But it feels very much like a school production. A passion project for sure, but one that could really use some tightening up.
The show covers so many issues that it feels like it would have been stronger picking just a few and really digging into them. Why was Justin Timberlake’s career forgiven while Janet Jackson’s crumbled, broken by an industry run by a handful of men who could have you pulled from radio and TV channels with the snap of a finger, simply because they didn’t feel a woman had given them the respect they thought they deserved?
It is an exhausting question and one that echoes through the theatre world too, where the people at the top still believe they get to control the narrative.
Nine Sixteenths Brixton House Verdict
Powerful, inventive and emotionally resonant, Nine Sixteenths is a confident, generous and quietly furious piece of theatre that more than earns its second London run. It is highly original and is a shining example of how theatre can be created to be accessible if you really want it to be. It’s not the best piece of theatre but its message and ambition shine through.
★★★
West End Wilma
Nine Sixteenths plays at Brixton House until 30 May 2026. All performances are integrated BSL.
