Is it a guilty pleasure to feel eroticised by someone who despises or ignores you? What does it mean to indulge in sexual fantasies that are mere fantasies? Can sadomasochistic pleasure be creative and inventive?
Written and directed by Cesca Echlin, Looking for Giants explores those questions by telling a woman’s (simply referred as “she”) sadomasochistic sexual fantasies that she claims to “leave invisible marks on your body which you only you know are there.” A snobbish university tutor whose indifferent and dismissive attitude arouses her. A tinder-match providing fodder for her masturbation fantasies eventually un-matches her, which amplifies her desire. A schoolboy she fancies but fails to have sex with. All in her mind, “conveniently” there for her reaching.
Deep down inside, Looking for Giants offers an amusing, precise and delicate autoethnography of female subjectivity that is, to a great extent, contingent on masculinity. The play may easily resonate with female audiences while provoking the male audiences, but it transcends oversimplified binaries of “womanhood is good vs. manhood is bad” or “woman as submissive vs. man as dominant.” In the first story, for instance, “she” becomes vulgarly masculine to confront professor, a persona she hates but secretly craves at the same time. She only calls this masculine uniform as her “monster”, because her disciplined female subjectivity disallows it. The sadomasochistic pleasure (even in fantasy), is in nature reflective of their power-dynamic in-between.
We seldom see a monologue play using the third person perspective, but it proves super effective with the speechlessly breathtaking Abby McCann, energetic yet self-contained. She delivers the whole stuff with illustrating complex yet nuanced physicality, frequently shifting in between “she”, and those men by using a microphone to amplify their male voices (it’s canon, isn’t it).
In one moment, McCann is the nervous, unsettled undergraduate girl terrified of arriving late for a tutorial. In the next, she morphs into the arrogant professor who constantly sniffs in a slightly exaggerated, cartoonish manner, eliciting knowing laughters from the audience. McCann keeps making frivolous eye contact with the audience, indicative of the character’s insatiable desire, always horny for erotic fantasy. Yet, the minute the light (designed simply yet effectively by Skylar Turnbull Hurd) starts to change colour and spotlight McCann from bottom to top, combined with Sarah Spencer’s soundscape, sometimes melodic, sometimes haunting, there’s a certain sane, distant sacredness in her.
In her book Unmarked, Peggy Phelan examines the importance of disappearance not only as the essence of live performance, but also as a way to resist the repetitive (re)production of capitalism. This strangely resonates with Echlin’s claim that “only inaction can guard something this precious”, where “she” never actually has physical sex with any of these men. However, precisely because these fantasies are never realised, they bear the hope for original, unarrested productivity.
Looking for Giants is a great performance. It might not provide a simple, straightforward answer through a complete, cohesive story, but it unabashedly shares its genuine feelings and confusions, leaving infinite room for thoughts and interpretations.
Looking for Giants is at King’s Head Theatre until 26th January 2025
