Stage Struck

LET’S TALK about sex. If we can be mature about it. And not so wearingly upfront that we kill its mystery. On second thoughts, let’s just play chess. As a subject, sex is everywhere, but it still makes people uncomfortable to have it out in the open. (And those kind of smutty innuendos don’t help.)

The depiction of sex inspires endless crusades (Is it pornography? Is it art?), gleeful outrage (“Chinese Communist party rocked by orgy scandal”), or – more routinely – merry embarrassment, such as the Literary Review’s bad sex in fiction award, where hapless authors fumble awkwardly towards a disappointing release. Sex, it seems, isn’t sexy.

In theatre, where physical desire is no less a motivation for human actions than anywhere else, sex features remarkably little, as though the medium is trapped in its own performance anxiety. Worried about being either obscene, prudish or ridiculous, it tends to deal with sex in teasing allusions or as something that is jokily unattainable. In other words,

it leaves it mainly to farce: “There’s far too much sex going on in this hotel,” complains one Ray Cooney character, typically, “and Im not having it!”

This is the context for a new show called Peep, created by three playwrights working with the Irish director Donnacadh O’Briain, who was influenced by the suggestion that sex can’t be put on stage without making it silly. Instead, his project flirts with something more grimy, inviting audience members to witness scenes of a sexual nature from individual peepshow booths, watching plays about the personal consequence of internet porn (Meat), a sexual stream of consciousness (69) and sex in a long-term relationship (SexLife). The clear suggestion is that exposing private emotional lives for the benefit of paying punters is closer to red-light voyeurism than we’d like to admit.

Perhaps that’s why elsewhere on the current stage, a number of revivals would prefer not to get their hands (or any other extremities) grubby with the act. Oscar Wilde unwinds a debate in A Woman of No Importance between puritan reserve and dandyish debauchery, where sex leads to ruin and the only active seduction is one man’s pursuit of another. The Plough and the Stars is so cluttered with neighbourly intrusions and the higher call of nationalism (“Ireland is greater than a wife”) that there’s barely a chance for intimacy and even a prostitute complains about slow business. And, most fascinatingly, Bernard Shaw’s short play Village Wooing, like the playwright’s own famously unconsummated marriage, is completely devoid of sex, as though it was a contaminant to happiness.

It says something that Shaw’s chaste utopia seems closer to an unreal fantasy or a dysfunction, but even he might approve of a show at the Edinburgh Fringe from Belfast-based Tumble Circus which seems better balanced between innocence and experience. In This Is How We Make Our Living, the acrobatic performers Ken and Tina talk about their romantic past, their break-up and their decision to remain professional partners. Meanwhile, their chemistry and trust shines through in exhilarating balancing acts and trapeze catches. It is a family entertainment, full of gentle metaphor, but somehow their platonic physical relationship goes deeper. It’s sexier than sex!