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Shopping
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A little while ago, Zadie Smith's "White Teeth" was the novel to be seen reading on the tube. In the late nineties, "Shopping and Fucking" was the play to go and see in London. Along with the work of Irvine Welsh, James Kelman, Sarah Kane, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and all the other young(ish) artists of their ilk, this play by HIV-positive Mark Ravenhill seemed to speak with the truly fucked-up voice of the modern age. If you were middle class, slightly self-destructive, had ever taken drugs, had bizarre or disturbing sex or handled stolen goods, this was the play for you. What is the message we are supposed to get from this play? Most of it is contained within the title, if you are willing to put a little time and thought in. Without witnessing the frankly hideous scenes which are contained within it, we can guess that there might be what is loosely described as a moral contained therein: the two functions of the title, both necessary and enjoyable, have become sordid, defining and strangely similar in today's evil, capitalist world. Where love comes in pill form, money forms the fundament of paradise and real personal relationships endanger the self and must be avoided. Like the hellish futures envisaged for us in science-fiction, but without the shiny space suits, we can hop into an orgasmatron, or we can pay to lick each others' arses, hoping we don't catch anything. As consumers, the choice is ours. Amy Hayes, looking like a character straight out of Hollyoaks, is splendid in her role as Lulu, the play's doll-like, understandably neurotic straight woman (in both senses). Behaving like a character straight out of Brecht, Lulu seems almost an innocent in the terribly depressing proceedings which take place around her, resorting to theft and drug-dealing through the need to keep herself and her uninterested boyfriend alive. After a slightly nervy start, Hayes stands out in the production - along with American Brian Stewart - as possessing considerable acting talent. Stewart's is the best mockney accent you'll ever hear from someone from Chicago, and something in his dead-eyed leer and doglike tongue make him the most plausible cockney gangster I've seen on stage or film for some time. Lulu's boyfriend - if you can call him that, seeing as he is in love with the snakelike Mark, and can no longer bear even to kiss her - is a loser, played with clubber-bimbo-chic by Ollie Meech, and their lover Mark (though what love Lulu gets from him is unclear) is - well - snakelike. Vacuous, co-dependent, witty and searching for himself (finding only psychobabble and a return to drug addiction), Mark is a burnt-out yuppie who is lost, lost, lost. The male-model-esque Peter Orlov (not shy of getting his washboard stomach out for the audience) makes an intriguing Mark, bouncing well off Meech's angry and ignorant Robbie. Praise goes too to Ben Van Der Velde for his hapless Geordie rent-boy, Gary, a walking corpse from the moment he appears on the stage. Like the product of any decent fin-de-siecle movement worth its salt,
this "in yer face" play may well be more a cry for help than
anything else, putting any message it intends to communicate across in
a non-committal way - as if it were a petulant child - and making us laugh
out loud in between. In so crying, however, it may unwittingly serve to
shock us into the thought that life doesn't have to be so wrong, so lacking
in meaning or real values. The play's most valuable gift may well be the
feeling of disgust it leaves with the audience as they realise they have
become paying voyeurs, making a sordid transaction just like the characters
before them. Su Jordan, 19.11.02 |
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