{"id":1029,"date":"2014-11-23T22:26:53","date_gmt":"2014-11-23T22:26:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/?p=1029"},"modified":"2014-11-23T22:32:18","modified_gmt":"2014-11-23T22:32:18","slug":"what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-sex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/2014\/11\/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-sex.html","title":{"rendered":"What we talk about when we talk about sex"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Accolade<\/a><\/p>\n

Accolade & The Institute of Sexology<\/strong><\/p>\n

I thought I knew what the 1950s talked about when it talked about sex. It talked about family and heteronormative hearts and flowers. Or else it talked about shame, and disease, and unrequited desire and unnameable longings. The British theatre told me that. No\u00ebl Coward opened the fifties with the snob-bound, vamp-shaming Relative Values, while Terence Rattigan\u2019s prime (The Deep Blue Sea<\/em>, Separate Tables<\/em>) offered poignant stories of unequal yearning \u2013 for a heedless chap, an icy wife. Sexual pleasure was fleeting, wounding, isolating, and that alienation so shaped the style of the drama \u2013 clipped, distraught, implicit \u2013 that it seemed soaked into the fabric of this era\u2019s theatre.<\/p>\n

So, that\u2019s the fifties for you. A stew of polite self-disgust, biding its time for the salty tongue and scruffy manners of Joan Littlewood and the Royal Court. Theatre artists and scholars keep finding new virtues in the plays \u2013 layers to the longing, shade in the shame \u2013 but I didn\u2019t expect to see a play of the era that argued back so convincingly. Until Accolade<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Group sex? In 1950?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Emlyn Williams\u2019 play comes from dead-on 1950 and is about sex, or scandal, or marriage, or looking life in the eye. All of that. William Trenting is a feted novelist of strong subjects: good sales, admiring reviews (over-egging the pudding, Williams throws in the Nobel Prize). There\u2019s also a nice wife, sweet kid, jolly pals \u2013 and now there\u2019s a knighthood coming his way. He has a raffish reputation but, guess what, the descriptions of brothels and all things vice don\u2019t come from imagination but from Will\u2019s rackety binges, when he takes himself off to unfashionable Rotherhithe for drink and group sex. Group sex? In 1950? Oh yes.<\/p>\n

Blanche McIntyre\u2019<\/a>s production at\u00a0London’s St James’ Theatre is just beautiful. She treats every character with respect, and the result is consistently unexpected \u2013 you never know what will happen next. The recurrent surprise is how calmly Will\u2019s circle receive news of his antics \u2013 from his wife (who has known forever), to his publisher, society friends, even his precocious son. It\u2019s blackmail and prosecution that make everything public, but no one remains shocked for very long, no one recoils. Everyone accepts that private lives are messy, many-threaded, things that resist simple categories. Emlyn Williams \u2013 not only a celebrated actor and playwright (Night Must Fall<\/em>, The Corn is Green<\/em>), but also a married bisexual \u2013 had a stake in this argument. But the real surprise is that the play was passed without emendation by the censor. Again, in 1950? Oh yes.<\/p>\n

The sex lives of others<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Accolade<\/a><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a chance to put how people discuss sexual behaviour and identity in perspective via a fascinating new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection. The Institute of Sexology<\/em><\/a> examines pioneering researchers into this thrillingly ambiguous subject. So what are sexologists talking about when they talk about sex? Sure, occasionally it\u2019s about toe-twirling jollies. But more often it\u2019s about unfixing society, questioning its default settings by proposing new ways of thinking about the mind (Freud), gender roles (Marie Stopes), social structures (Margaret Mead), normalcy (Kinsey). The exhibition is full of implausible apparatus (much dick accessorising: tortoiseshell for pleasure, metal-toothed to prohibit single-handed fun), and also charts in which people record their own and others\u2019 sex lives. The most elaborate is Carolee Schneemann\u2019s 1960s-70s art project, each casual bunk-up producing a box-filling cavalcade unspooling across the wall, distinguishing between orgasm noises including howl, moan, growl, cry, \u2018oooo\u2019.<\/p>\n

Many of the ologists attempt to unmoor sex from shame. Human experience, they suggest, defies theories and categories: see the resplendently moustachioed Victorian chap posing in lingerie. Deviation at the margins isn\u2019t always delicious. A spectacularly glum photo shows Radclyffe Hall (The Well of Loneliness<\/em>) and her partner Una Troubridge, unsmiling under stout coats, big hats and a pair of dachshunds wondering if fun has been cancelled indefinitely.<\/p>\n

Back at Accolade,<\/em> what does Will Trenting want from his sexual other life? Not merely, it is suggested, sex. He may get sportive in Rotherhithe with Phyllis and Harold and Ed and Joan, but binging on booze and bodies crucially represents a chance to leap the fences of class-bound Britain, to hang loose and play hard and not be only his respectable self. Sex \u2013 his Rotherhithe life \u2013 represents a chance to be both who he feels he really is and who he doesn\u2019t have to be.<\/p>\n

I love a slice of Rattigan, a dollop of Coward \u2013 but look at what Accolade<\/em> doesn\u2019t do. It doesn\u2019t use English place names (Budleigh Salterton, Leamington Spa) for comic effect. It doesn\u2019t drag in servants and stuffy bourgeoisie to set off the protagonist\u2019s heightened sensibilities. It doesn\u2019t bluster, it doesn\u2019t sneer. You feel that you\u2019ve spent an evening with people, not avatars in period dress. Accolade includes a singular blackmailer \u2013 especially in Bruce Alexander\u2019s spectacularly seedy, needy, beady performance. It is initially uncertain what Daker (whose underage daughter Trenting has fumbled) is pursuing: money, revenge, some free literary consultancy? Gradually it becomes clear that he doesn\u2019t so much want to hurt Trenting as to inhabit his life. The public persona that William longs to escape is everything that Daker wants to pull tight around him. Accolade is never dishonest about class \u2013 abandoning respectability is as much a luxury for William as the booze and books. For most people, it\u2019s a shove into the cold.<\/p>\n

Knuckle shuffling at something horrible<\/strong><\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t expect to be reminded of Accolade<\/em> at Nothing<\/em><\/a> by the excellent young company Barrel Organ. An interweave of eight monologues by Lulu Rackza \u2013 spoken by different\u00a0members of the ensemble\u00a0and in a different order, at each performance \u2013 it also circles around sex, and work, and what the world expects of you. For these snarling, witty, wounded people in their twenties, everything is drained of satisfaction: the sex is disconsolate porn-goggling, the work too dull to describe, the expectations low as can be. The girl on the bus is an accidental hero, the angry drudge a self-damaging vandal. Coming of age in austerity, in capitalism\u2019s long grey twilight, there is nowhere for these speakers to place their desires and fury. The performance was a small room full of forlorn conversations, turning hurtfully upon their speakers. When they talk about sex \u2013 mostly solitary, bored nights knuckle-shuffling at something horrible \u2013 they don\u2019t speak about desire, but a void where they hope desire might flourish and sustain them. Sex, shame, desire and damage \u2013 Williams might recognise it all, 60 years on.<\/p>\n

Images: top, Alexander Hanson and Abigail Cruttenden in <\/em>Accolade (Photo: Tristram Kenton);below, bronze porcupine from Freud’s desk, representing the prickliness of human relationships\u00a0(photo: Freud Museum)<\/em><\/p>\n

Follow David on Twitter: @mrdavidjays<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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