The opening commandment of Freya Daly Sadgrove’s poetry show Whole New Woman brings a slow smile to my face. I can’t help it – I’m a sucker for a woman who knows exactly who she is and exactly what she wants.

Freya is the ringleader of the dazzling poetry performance group Show Ponies and tonight is the opening night of her first full-length solo show. She enters, backlit by an emerging sun, staunch and self-assured.

Whole New Woman is a loud blend of poetry, music and theatre. It showcases seven poems from Freya’s debut collection Head Girl, alongside a myriad of new works. She is supported by drummer Samuel Austin and guitarist/bassist Ingrid Saker, and the show is produced by O+P Works.

Set and costume designer Sam Ducker-Jones creates a moody lucid dream on stage. The set is 70s-disco-meets-Euphoria-meets-prom. Lighting designer Grace Newton illuminates the stage with several isolated sources of light, including lamps and spotlights. Strategically placed, they bounce off the bejewelled hanging centrepiece and the pink metallic fringe accents on the costumes.

For the next hour, Freya delivers raw and bold declarations of what it means to be young, horny, hilarious and unhinged. She looks beyond the audience, into the black hole that opens up behind us, and peers into her past, when she was 15 years old drinking KGBs in Karori. She headbangs her shaggy mane and convinces you that you want to have sex with her, like the rock star that she is.

In a poem called ‘Reasonable Requests’, Freya makes unreasonable demands of her unrequited lover, mad with power. She is Michelangelo and I am marble-turned-putty in her hands. She moulds me into her ideal partner, but not before humiliating me in the process.

Adult Freya is unapologetic, aggressive, and rough around the edges. But she alludes to her badassery stemming from an adolescence of trying to be good – she was Head Girl of her high school, after all. “I used to be a good girl, or I used to do a creative interpretation of the right thing,” she muses. Whole New Woman is what you get when good girls explode and plaster their intrusive thoughts on the school lockers, a-la-Mean Girls.

Unfortunately, the second half of the show is not as enjoyable as the first. Instead of performing poetry to music, Freya blends the two to the point where the poetry is not discernible from the music.

In the first half of the show, only the musicians play instruments, allowing Freya to focus solely on delivering her work. Her booming voice carries lines clearly to the audience, over music that is purposefully loud.

In the second half, I find it difficult to differentiate the song-poems from each other, and the blaring volume gives me sensory overload. I really wish the mics could be turned down, so Freya could scream at me all she wanted without it physically hurting my ears. Apathy is the last thing I want to feel towards her poetry but my thoughts are inundated with the sheer volume of the performance.

During the climax of the show, she destroys the rocking chair next to her. She rips a dowel off the chair and shreds an electric-guitar solo with it. I wonder if the wooden piece of furniture (which does not match any of the set) is some kind of metaphor, or if it exists purely to be destroyed at the end.

My favourite parts of the second half are when she breathes heavily into the mic in between songs while tuning her guitar. The intimacy is palpable. Existing in the naked quiet with Freya, the audience can finally see beyond the armour of ripped black clothing and rock music. We appreciate her for who she was as a teenager, and the whole new woman she has become.

Whole New Woman was on 9–11 March at BATS theatre in Wellington as part of New Zealand Fringe Festival.