Image: let me take you to donut-paradise
Todd Boyce and Daniel Higley in Donut
A theatrical alternative (and much cheaper option) to the usual West End flotsam of traditional musicals and play revivals can be found in Lovers From Hell, a provoking and often hilarious three play production by new gay theatre company, Psychodrome.
It’s founder, writer and director Robert Farrar is quick to point out that the company caters for broad tastes, but this particular show is very much ‘Queer Theatre’ despite the tales covering both homo and hetero shenanigans.
For those of you worried that a night out experiencing fringe theatre may be as appealing as watching Elizabeth Hurley perform a one-woman show, fear not. This is as professional as they come, with strong performances and the whole thing staged in a space intimate enough to see expressions and nuances usually lost in bigger auditoriums.
Each play is linked by the theme of sexual madness and confusion and all are very different in style and tone.
Complex for instance conjures up a scenario where a flighty girl tracks down a forty year old man she is obsessed with in the wilds of Devon. Although a little hard going in the first act its mixture of shocking revelations and frank ‘shagging’ on a sofa eventually puts a smile on your face. There’s nothing like a bit of black comedy bonking to sweeten the sour taste of a sick joke as this play demonstrably shows!
Get The Guest is a saucy gem of a tale concerning sexual compulsion and post coital guilt, presented here in the form of ubber camp Sandy whose diligence to domestic matters at his Western Super-Mare guesthouse also extends to his unsuspecting male guests. The performance by the brilliant James Holmes is worth the ticket alone.
This is the most amusing of the pieces, even managing to elicit belly laughs from the audience, but still delivers a sting in the tale that lingers in the mind well after the lights go down. Anyone who has ever been lusted after then dumped like a sack of King Edwards after sex will relate to this rather grand guignol comedy that has the touch of a Victoria Wood sitcom about it.
The Smell of Asparagus Pee, the final play, or more aptly ‘monologue for two’ demonstrates the thespian skills of its two actors who had played completely different characters in the previous play. It’s difficult to describe this piece, which centres on two lovers experiencing a rollercoaster ride of emotions and testing moments in their relationship. The rich, scintillating and at times visceral dialogue is engaging, even if the viewer can’t quite grasp the overall meaning.
With performances such as these combined with some wonderful writing, particularly by Farrar who penned the British ensemble movie Bedrooms and Hallways - this is a theatre company with a promising future. Go and see it.
By: Richard Bevan
Lovers From Hell doesn't quite do what it says on the tin. Promising plays about "people in extreme states of erotic and sexual confusion" and with a poster of a naked man in a wild-boar mask, one expects to be watching bizarre penchants and peccadillos through splayed fingers.
Well, you might if you find foot fetishism remarkable, and one playlet certainly gets the prize for most inventive use of doughnuts. But this is more sting-in-the-tale territory; imagine Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected if he were gay.
While Complex is the only heterosexual offering of the four plays here, it certainly has a surprising sexual twist as a gushing young woman turns up at the Devon house of Paul (Todd Boyce), a handsome older hunk with a line in chunky-knit sweaters and seduction.
In this, as in the other, mostly larky, works by Shaun Levin and Robert Farrar for the Psychodrome company, a farcical touch lightens matters. That's certainly true of Get The Guest, set at the Gemini Lodge B&B in Weston-super-Mare. As the camp mine host hitting on a nerdy guest, James Holmes' star comic turn doesn't so much chew the scenery as tear it into little pieces.
The bafflingly titled The Spell of Asparagus Pee is the most original piece, crisply directed by Farrar and Phil Setren. A series of letters and emails from an abandoned lover spoken aloud by two identically dressed characters, Holmes and Nick Malinowski, reveals obsession, torment and recalled moments of love ("We rolled in sand like biscuits in sugar.")
Mark Cook
Finds the hidden door that connects drawing-room pleasanteries to our most profound anxieties.
– Fenton Bailey, co-producer/director of Party Monster and Inside Deep Throat.
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