Emilie Pine’s Good Sex tells you one thing before going in: that each night, a new pair of actors will feature without having rehearsed. It’s described as an experimental piece, but I would accompany this with it having an incredibly meta-theatre feel to it. There are two real-life actors who perform as the two ‘actors’. There’s an intimacy director who isn’t actually the intimacy director, she’s an actor. But she’s also definitely the ‘actors’ intimacy director. It’s all rather mind-boggling in the best way.
For Press Night, the delightful Jack Gleeson and Phia Sagan took on the roles of the ‘actors’. Guided by Barry O’Kiernan and Maeve O’Mahony (we’ll get to them), feeding them their lines from a sound box, and Liv O’Donoghue supporting them through the intimate stage directions, Jack and Phia perform Pine’s play as it is communicated to them.
The scene is set at the height of the pandemic, when ‘no touching’ (unless you’re Matt Hancock, of course) was a government order. Jack and Phia’s ‘characters’ (let’s call them Jack and Phia) meet up at Jack’s flat. They’ve been broken up for three years when Phia calls Jack out of the blue. After getting drunk off red wine, they reminisce on the night they first met, playing this out for the audience to see. They waltz through specific memories from their relationship, and what led to their eventual breakup, making sure to include all the intimate scenes that you certainly don’t usually see in theatre.
That’s where O’Donoghue comes in as the intimacy director, reminding them of the need for consent while also following the script’s direction. It’s positively deceptive. It seems rather unbelievable that these two actors have just as much knowledge about the play as the audience does.
Because of this, Phia and Jack (the actors, not their characters) appear somewhat lost and naive on stage while also captivating the audience. They switch between serious actors following a script and two innocently naive people unsure of what’s coming next. O’Donoghue’s direction, which is actually her performance and director Ben Kidd’s direction, is bold, brilliant and unique. It’s like nothing I’ve seen before, but I now wish to see more of.
The aforementioned Barry and Maeve are two actors who are mostly confined to a black sound box upstage. The script sits in front of them on desks, and they feed lines to Phia and Jack through microphones. At first, I worried that their presence might distract from the performance, but you slowly learn that they are an integral part of it. Hearing their laughter, yawns, and everything in between muffled through the sound box only adds to their charm, allowing them to insert themselves into the production as the actors’ shadow selves. Their significance becomes apparent as the play unfolds, but they initially appear almost as props.
In fact, as the audience fill the seats in Battersea Arts Centre’s Grand Hall, Barry and Maeve’s sound box is the only part of the set on an otherwise empty stage. Rather than presenting the audience with a full set from the start, the set develops gradually as the narrative unfolds. It creates a sense of anticipation around both the actors’ and audience’s understanding of the story, assembling the set piece by piece as the narrative builds line by line.
This artistic choice feeds into the play’s wider meta-theatrics, blurring the lines between what’s real in the script versus what’s being played out for the first time. It allows the audience and the actors to engage with both the narrative and the process of the narrative being presented, resulting in raw, real-time reactions. It’s incredibly well executed, so props to the magnificent brains behind this!
The entire cast and crew involved in bringing this production to life are utterly brilliant. The crew blend into the cast, appearing fleetingly to build the set one moment and deliver witty one-liners the next. O’Donoghue feels a bit like a GCSE Drama teacher and Regina George’s mum rolled into one. She’s witty and fun but also takes her job very seriously. She must make sure the sex is good.
Her character feels über-meta, introducing herself as the intimacy director, although the programme will tell you the actual intimacy directors are Sue Mythen and Abigail Kessel. O’Donoghue welcomes the audience by thanking them for trusting her with this experimental piece, so you would also be forgiven for assuming she might be the playwright, or perhaps the director.
Whatever form she takes, intimacy director, drunk girl who falls asleep at the party, or the random girl Jack has sex with, she does so with a magnetic charm that is so enticing you can’t keep your eyes off her movements, even when the play’s focus is entirely elsewhere.
Pine’s script is exceptionally intelligent and well-crafted. While it may be dripping in humour and endearing bashfulness, there is a clear underlying message about the importance of consent, both in relationships and for actors on stage and screen. When a script includes intimate scenes, an actor must provide their consent on stage or on set in order for that scene to succeed.
And, in relationships, as Phia points out, “everybody follows the script”. You might do something you don’t necessarily want to do, but you consent (or oblige) because it’s part of the process, or what’s expected of you. Phia and Jack are no strangers to this, following the script and lines communicated to them by Maeve and Barry. It’s only when the supporting cast and crew disappear that Phia and Jack are finally granted agency over how they act, whether playing the part of actors or their true selves. At times, it’s hard to distinguish what’s real and what’s not, but I think that’s exactly the point.
Good Sex is an achingly tender, funny, ingenious production. For anyone second-guessing an experimental piece of theatre, I implore you to give this production a chance. You’d be a fool to turn Good Sex down.
You can catch the final two performances of Good Sex at Battersea Arts Centre on 5 and 6 November.
Listings and ticket information can be found here
