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The
Sex Party
Menier
Chocolate Factory Autumn 2022
Terry Johnson’s light and unmemorable comedy The Sex Party gives us nine generally articulate two-dimensional characters rambling through a flimsy plot for one hundred and fifty minutes on an impressive set depicting an Islington kitchen.
The strong cast of actors that includes the Oscar winner Timothy Hutton struggle hard to give the show life, but perhaps in desperate frustration become suddenly unrealistically emotionally overheated in a final section before running for the imagined exits.
The opening section of the performance is much calmer. The hosts Alex (Jason Merrells) and his much younger partner Hetty (Molly Osborne) are welcoming the couple Gilly (Lisa Dwan) and Jake (John Hopkins), who have never been to what they refer to as a party for swingers or a bit of partner swapping.
These being more modern times they are told the words swinger and swapping are not used. It is also mentioned several times that everything has to be consensual.
Gradually others arrive, alcohol is consumed and the guests mostly continue chatting rather than head to the next room for sex, despite the women gradually taking off various items of clothing.
Things become potentially more unsettling for the characters when one hour into the play Lucy (Pooya Mohseni), a trans-woman, arrives. The prejudice the others then express seems irritatingly superficial, silly or dated.
The drug-addled Tim (Will Barton) asks her where she stands on JK Rowling and whether she supports Rowling or Harry Potter. Some of the others find the issue of pronouns a bit of a problem with one of them objecting to 'left-wing linguistic supremacy.'
Lucy reminds them that their offensive behaviour has its much more deadly version down some back street where a person like her would be murdered, but as a character in the play, she is almost entirely a brief conversational object rather than a living breathing person.
After that short journey into seriousness, they are back chatting about dogs and other random subjects, with the rich right-wing American Jeff (Timothy Hutton) and his provocative Russian partner Magdalena (Amanda Ryan) resembling some satirical puppet escapees from the Spitting Image show.
A non-consensual sexual act does take place off stage but is skated over so quickly with the assailant being given a comical expression to laugh at that it seems to be trivialising the event.
Terry Johnson who also directed the show has written important plays such as Insignificance, and this one has moments of wit and is easy to watch, but it seems to have no focused purpose, a slight plot and little convincing characterisation.
Keith
McKenna
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Review - The Sex Party - Menier Chocolate Factory Theatre 2022