Review: CONVERSATIONS AFTER SEX, Park Theatre

This review contains spoilers.

Mark O’Halloran’s Irish Times Award-winning play follows a woman’s sexual escapades over the course of a year. Protected by anonymity, she and her bed guests drop their guard alongside their clothes, demanding nothing more than each other’s body. Being shrouded in mystery allows for a profound level of connection. Nameless negotiations and eager acceptance develop inside liberated vignettes where intimacy briefly bridges the gap between strangers.

Characters open up freely, detailing heartache, bereavement, and loss, reaping the benefits of not being known, but trying at the same time to be loved. Uncomplicated sex becomes the counterpart of a complicated life. With a London premiere directed by Jess Edwards with natural ease, it’s a shame Conversations After Sex suffers from severe woman-written-by-a-man syndrome.

“I frighten myself sometimes. I don’t know who I am,” she says. By the end of the show, we’re still unaware of who she is besides her trauma. What we learn is that her boyfriend killed himself and she was the one who found him in the house they shared. She also spent her younger years caring for her ailing father, hence her lack of friends. But the piece isn’t about that, it’s about her destructive behaviours and emotional coping mechanisms. Her survivor’s guilt mixes with resentment in a distantly touching sequence where she speaks to her late ex whilst tripping on acid, but we otherwise shut out everything about her grief.

The men, however, get to speak loads, mostly refusing to see themselves as the problem. Some of them leave, some stay longer, one micro-doses to repress his feelings, another cheats on his fiancée and gives her chlamydia. One assaults her (cue a horrifying struggle played out against orange lighting where she lets out a series of blood-curdling screams).

These episodic conversations are as deep as a shallow puddle. Heinous men are compared to the nicer ones, and her sister F visits occasionally with her own woes. O’Halloran touches upon themes of isolation, alienation, loneliness, family (and lack thereof) using antagonism and misogyny as his main tools, but everything is always to be taken at face value. The acrimony with her sister is never truly cracked open, nor is her refusal to get therapy for what happened to her. She is an idea rather than a character. The dialogues too are a mixed bag of ordinary vernacular and more artificial turns of phrase meant to be deeper than they are, making it an uneven script.

Olivia Lindsay is charming as the protagonist and Julian Moore-Cook handles the variety of men with flexibility, moulding accent and exuberance accordingly. They’re joined by Jo Herbert as the crabby sister. The cast  is a tight machine who delivers the story with tact and poignance: the material is flawed, the company is not. Edwards directs with dynamism, setting the scene changes to thumping music (excellently lit by Bethany Gupwell) as the duo dress or undress while they make or undo the bed. She also tries to dare a bit, opening with Moore-Cook in full frontal nudity (just in case the title or the huge centrepiece bed didn’t tell us this was about sex).

The main issue is that the play doesn’t really have anything much to say. The agonising search for closeness in the wrong places ultimately isn’t explored, and nor are the rest of the motifs. It mostly comes off as a male fantasy, where people try to save each other, to no avail. Having a woman directing, unfortunately, doesn’t change that.

Conversations After Sex runs at the Park Theatre until 17 May.