The world premiere of Bingo by award-winning writer Alan Flanagan comes to Pleasance London to conclude the first season in the theatre’s brand new 80-seat Downstairs. This honest and comic play explores London’s LGBTQ+ culture, what it means to find belonging through transgression, and the complexity of sexuality and sexual health.
Performed by Alan Flanagan (Everyone’s Dead! The Post-Apocalyptic Podcast, Edinburgh; Dark Shadows, Big Finish Productions) and directed by Dan Hutton (Garden, UK Tour; The Spanish Tragedy, Old Red Lion Theatre), Bingo is a stripped-back one-man show led by the pinball that is Cormac who bounces manically between his distant sexual past, and his present attempts to turn a host of survivable conditions into a liveable life.
In a quest to unspool his sexual history – wanking off another lad in the showers after a Gaelic match, losing his virginity under the watchful eye of a looping ad for Footballers’ Wives, sampling the sexual and pharmaceutical smorgasbord of London – Cormac tells the story about an Irishman and one defining moment…
Following his first ever STI test, Cormac discovers the unthinkable: he’s contracted everything, running the gamut from the potentially lethal to the irrepressibly itchy and back again. The doctor has pamphlets, but as Cormac sprints into the Archway traffic, only one word rattles around his mind: “Bingo”.
Alan Flanagan comments, Sexual health is both hugely important and a funny little thing that nobody seems to want to talk about – I felt urged to write Bingo when I went to my clinic for a regular check-up and quite literally ran into a locked door. They’d closed down the clinic without telling anyone. As sexual health services are being gutted up and down the country, it seemed the right time to tell a story about the misery, the hilarity and the unadulterated (and often adulterated) weirdness of our relationship with our bodies.
In addition to this production, SLAM will be running Two SLAMinutes at Arcola Studio 1 on Sunday 6th May – where 30 spoken word artists, burlesque performers, singer-songwriters, comedians and playwrights will each have their say on one topic – as well as two LGBT+ bingo and scratch nights.
Bingo is at The Pleasance Theatre 5th – 24th June 2018.
