Shopping and Fucking is definitely the most anal play of the year, though whether it is for reasons the playwright intended is debatable. As you enter the Barney Simon Theatre you enviously notice that the actors are going to lounge on a huge, Dali- esque couch, while you have to sit on a backless bench and designer working- class foam.
The resulting spinal and rectal discomfort will therefore get the audience (or so the trendy logic might go) to pity, identify with or admire a bunch of junkies in far-off London town.
Curiously enough, one doesn’t, and for all its tongue-in-cheekness, you can take that top and bottom, the play doesn’t deliver.
Based on the Ecstasy drug culture in London, it has echoes of that ode to the tight Scottish fist, Trainspotting, and also goes all the way inwards, which increasingly seems to mean excremental. But whereas that seductive film’s premise is that there’s basically no difference between a junkie and a middle-class materialist, the play ends up being too self- conscious to be moral and too affectedly moral to be subversive.
What it’s really saying is that it’s cool to be intellectually blotto, emotionally soppy, sexually blurred and, as in much gay and straight commerce, misogynistic.
Apart from the actors struggling to maintain their accents, it’s interesting to note that it is the woman, admirably played by Sylvaine Strike, who has to show off her breasts in a humiliating interview scene for (some of) our voyeuristic delight.
The only time the boys need to – and therefore censoriously don’t – take out their willies is when they have to simulate all kinds of sex.
So, take away the catchy title and the chic sponsor, Diesel, and you end up with something akin to the downstairs bust of Barney Simon, “captured” as a shy academic rather than the theatrical visionary he was. Both modes of perception are oh-so downright prissy.
But the main reason for the play’s failure is that director Yael Farber (and probably the playwright) opted for playing Ecstasy music between scenes, a dire mistake, since this overpowering sound becomes the leading star, much like the cutaways of rocks in the fim Picnic at Hanging Rock.
But hell, don’t expect a Sam Shepard trip or JG Ballard incantation about technology and its relation to us or vice versa.
Don’t think about William Burroughs saying drugs might well be a right- wing conspiracy. Don’t expect any analysis whatsoever in this age of silent information and loud nuclear explosions. Expect, instead, a bunch of sentimental pussycats whose claws have not merely been clipped, but permanently extracted.
As Steven Berkoff showed us a couple of months ago, all a good night’s theatre requires is a good script, a good actor, and voila! you have a universe. But incorporate too much technology and you’re in deep faeces, which is why most theatre has long ago left the archaic four-wall and gone out to the global youth via, among others, rock concerts, usually in conjunction with that infinitely more dangerous and therefore fascinating drug television.
Think of Bono doing a Salom with the Alien-like remote camera in the recent broacast of U2 “live” in Mexico, and you have more universal theatre and ecstacy in a few end-of-the-millennium moments than in a thousand Shopping and Fuckings.
This is because you can take the erotic drugs of your choice in the dynamic comfort of your own space, and get truly interactive.
Neil Sonnekus is a writer and film- maker