THEGAYUK

Day: 4 May 2014

  • THEATRE REVIEW | Foreplay, King’s Head Theatre, London

    ★★★ | Foreplay, King’s Head Theatre, London

    Some of the greatest minds of the post-War central European generation, Theodore Adorno and his wife Gretel, Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin became caught up in a heady mix of sexual and intellectual intrigue, infidelity, rivalry and mutual obsession. Years later, with Benjamin dead and Adorno established as one of the leading thinkers of his time Theodore, Gretel and Hannah are invited to a meal by a mysterious young woman. When their host reveals that she has access to documents that could change their lives for ever, all three are forced to face the lies, jealousies and sexual proclivities that they have hidden for decades, as their loyalty to each other is tested to the utmost.

    A psycho-sexual thriller of betrayal and revenge, Foreplay takes us into the lives of some of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century, exposing the chasm between the public and private, what is erotic and what is pornographic, and the uneasy relationship between genius and hypocrisy in us all.

    This is the world premiere of Carl Djerassi’s new play at the King’s Head Theatre and the staging of the production, the skill of the actors and the intimacy of the space would certainly do justice to the piece. The claustrophobic nature of the play is conveyed to perfection and there isn’t a weak link in the cast with some very strong performances, my favourite being Judi Scott as the fearsome Hannah Arendt.

    The problem for me was the play itself. In spite of a fascinating premise, some well placed humour and pacey dialogue, it felt less like a meditation on intellectual versus physical foreplay and infidelity but more like a virtual reality recreation of a particularly long and dry menopause. I suspect that had I known more about German 20th Century philosophers, political theorists and sociologists then I might have found the play more compelling. As it was, I found it mostly quite dull in content and even the intriguing human elements failed to hold my interest fully for long as the intellectual debates and parrying quickly took the sparkle away from any of the merits of the excellent production.

    In spite of this, it’s well worth seeing just for the clever set and the highly accomplished acting. The brief moments of humour are well placed and timed to perfection.

    The play runs until the 31st of May

    Buy tickets here: http://www.kingsheadtheatre.com/main.html

  • COLUMN | Mary Mary

    As a child my parents were occasionally like a composite of the characters in the sit-com “The Good Life”. Like Margot and Jerry Ledbetter, they were a teaming mass of petty snobbery but also like Tom and Barbara Good, they were quite self-sufficient. We were dragged along on a regular basis to their allotment garden and forced to help out. In between we’d be roped in to help tend flowerbeds or the fruit trees in our suburban home or water and clean the many potted plants and herbs indoors.

    I would receive unwanted gifts to sweeten the pill: a bright blue children’s wheelbarrow and a various miniature garden tools. For me, a Dutch hoe will always be something you push between your potatoes rather than a woman in a bikini in a window in Amsterdam. I recall happily the joy of being given my own patch of soil to grow vegetables in and watching little shoots of life poking through but this was counterbalanced by the horror of being a picky eater with parents who had a seemingly never ending supply of fresh vegetables.

    Mud was never a thing I relished, being a pernickety child who liked to dress in tweeds and velvets like a mini aristocrat. I hated being outdoors and whiling away hours that could have been spent indoors hunched over a book reading about Milly-Molly Mandy or Narnia. I’d petulantly pace around collecting insects in matchboxes then putting them back unharmed later or kicking moodily at old tree stumps whilst thinking about the good-looking music teacher who played a guitar. I still recall the repetitive boredom of picking green beans or shelling peas, followed by the even worse indignity of having to eat them.

    I longed for parents who bought their vegetables ready washed from Marks and Spencer. Actually, I longed for parents who didn’t buy vegetable at all unless they were pre-cut into crinkle cut chips.

    The irony is that my parents taught me some valuable skills: patience and the ability to tend and grow things. I’m now a demon gardener and totally love nature. I’m also a vegetarian who eats at least 10 of my 5 a day. The ironic bit comes in also when you realise that in my London flat I haven’t got a sod of soil to my name. In times of stress I drift off and imagine myself in a soothing suburban garden full of flowers and fruit trees (an unlikely prospect, given London house prices). I picture myself in a cast iron Victorian conservatory spraying greenfly with a copper implement.

    Even in my fantasies I draw the line at growing vegetables, though. There’s a huge supermarket round the corner. Some childhood experiences put you off things for life.

  • OPINION | Are we to quick to slut shame?

    Slut, tramp, whore, slag, trollop, floozy, tart, Ho, skank, Loose, easy. All words that we use to describe someone of who is perceived as sexually promiscuous.

    Except we are not describing we are judging. We are perceiving someone that has sex and labelling them.
    Of course most times these descriptions were traditionally assigned to women. This is because a long time ago some men created a double standard. Men were allowed to enjoy sex, indeed virility was celebrated and seen as a positive thing.

    Last year it was okay to be Robin Thicke but not Miley Cyrus It’s based on hypocrisy. Sadly this practice has carried through to present day with some cultures even still practising female circumcision. As we are still living in a heteronormative society, we all grew up here and learnt these rules early on, so of course we carried over the practice into the gay world. We are still men after all.

    We need to stop the practice of slut-shaming.

    Why does the number of sexual partners someone has make any difference? If we are all still men then why does the double standard still exist? I speak from a position of being single for a long time and people having that perception of me to being in a relationship in present day? Have I changed as a person? No my circumstances have. But because I have a partner, I am suddenly viewed as acceptable.

    Do we slut shame because we perceive people as a threat? I mentioned the heteronormative world before, the acceptable thing for us to do is to grow up, find someone you love, settle down and have kids.

    Obviously biologically we have to skip the last step naturally, does the fear come from someone that has chosen to live outside the mainstream? Is it the same prejudice that used to apply to us being gay 50 years ago? Is the threat of the single sexually confident man about the fact they may tempt and seduce our partners away? We have to act pre-emptivly and attack them and let them know their place.

    We are deciding that they have loose morals and dismissing them. We have reduced them as to their sex life. We don’t care about them as a person. We disregard their hopes, dreams, career and more importantly we take away their voice. We assume that they simply live their lives that way because they are only interested in hedonism. For some people that may be true however for others it may be that they are doing it because they confuse sex with love. If a man will sleep with them they must desire them and love them on some level. This was certainly not my experience; sex is a basic human need and right. In this day and age nobody should care about your sex life as long as you respect your own body and health.

    The gay world we are subject to hyper-sexualised imagery. Bars are promoted by attractive men in their underwear and little else; the magazines we buy are filled with adverts for chat lines, saunas, escorts and porn. For most of our early lives we repressed our sexual desires only to come out and be told you can look but don’t touch. Slut shaming is not healthy, useful or productive for anyone. It feeds the fears of the people doing it and degrades the victim. As a minority that faces prejudice already we should know better.

     

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