January 31, 1998: Ravenhill, Shopping and Fucking

Queen’s

The program calls it Shopping and F***ing, a disingenuous nod to some ideal of reticence and propriety; but that  ideal is noticeable in London life and London theatre by its almost complete absence. This is Ravenhill’s first play, and first produced play, and it shows; and yet Ravenhill has some talent, and one hopes he gets his act together in some subsequent play. This is a Royal Court / Out of Joint co-production embarrassed by its own stupendous success. The audience was almost all under thirty-five, and they knew they were in the presence of Class A Trendy. Loud, ear-splitting acid rock between scenes; a neon screen upstage center that highlighted the subject of the current scene (“BED SIT,” etc.); and a group of down-and-nearly-out characters — one woman, five men — all involved in the current hard drug, gay sex scene. Things go from bad to worse, but then some circle or other comes full, and in the last scene we have a replay of the first, in which three of the five characters, bonded in some sort of unorthodox menage, decide to love one another and be happy despite it all. Cute, charming, and completely unconvincing. In fact, for all its realism, its super-sensational realism including live oral and anal man-to-man (or man to boy) simulated sex scenes (there were signs all over the Queen’s warning audiences of possibly offensive simulated sex acts), this play is a boys’ and girls’ adolescent fantasy that finally spares us the trouble of having to think seriously about the damages exacted by drugs and promiscuity in today’s London.

The play is directed by a very big name, Max Stafford-Clark, no amateur; he saw what the play had to offer in the way of seeming no-holds-barred analysis of what life is like for freaked-out under-thirties and under-twenties. But I really think this is finally just high-grade junk, and if I were to be just a little severe I would accuse Stafford-Clark of cynicism. We need a George Bernard Shaw to take this play apart properly and reveal the flimsy, head-in-the-sand foundation that it’s based on. Five actors give it their all; they are at least competent, and one or two are quite talented. But this is very self-indulgent (on the author’s part), sentimental clap-trap that leaves us on Cloud 9 instead of showing us the real horrors of the subject.