So rather than struggling to find as gig to go to in the first full week of the year we decided instead to go to see some Fringe theatre and this x-rated play at the Vaults in Waterloo.
If you are at all homophobic or get offended by gay sex it's probably best you don't read on.
This play by Joe Dipetro is a apparently a re-working of Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde and unlike in its first Iteration as F*cking Men back in 2009 that had a cast of 10 this version the cast has been stripped down to just 3 actors Richard De Lisle, Harper James and Haydn Whiteside who perform all of the original roles performing as several characters each.
So the play takes a long hard look at the Gay dating scene in the 21st century opening with a gay hook up in what I guessed was park after dark but arranged on an app for the sort of encounter that might have been described as a Billet Doux in the 20th century, as a very "I'm straight, I'm a soldier But I just want to find out what it's like for a guy to blow me" scene unfolds and descends into homophobic violence after the squaddies shot his lot And the shame kicks in.
This incident gets brought back up several times as we move through various other common gay hook up scenarios from the sauna scene to the Gym scene as the guys meet up for very brief sexual interludes while telling us to camera so to speak that humans were not made to be monogamous and that to be so is a curse. All the while the actors are in various states of undress and simulating various sex acts.
We see the gay couple who live together but have less and less sex together as sex is something seen as being more transitory and who wants to actually make love to anyone and what a turn off that is. So the more dominant partner is screwing his way through anyone and everyone he can hook up with while his poor partner who wants some love has to start sleeping around too, just to try to get what's missing from his relationship.
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They also explore if and when you should reveal your HIV status especially when positive and how easy it is for some men to have unprotected sex even though they know they are positive. So let's go and hook up in a nice hotel and whatever you do don't talk too much or ever mention wanting to Make love rather than wanting to F*ck or suck or whatever sex act you want next, just don't call it love.
By the end of the play while the lifestyle looks like fun it is also at times sad as the friendship and affection craved by some of the characters can never be attained while staying involved in a hook up scene like this no matter how you try to convince the closeted theatrical you love that you can have a real relationship rather than the fiction they have with the wife or Girlfriend who is your partner in public and publicity as they question is it good or bad for Box office to be open and honest about one's sexual desires.
The play went down very well indeed with the mainly male audience and was a lot of fun even for a monogamous straight bloke like me. To find out about more performances check out www.facebook.com/fckingmen
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