No one knows who wrote the words of Manwatching. No one can see a script before they go into the show. That includes the person who will deliver it. The audience don’t know who that will be – it is different each night – but they do know it will be a man. He speaks a script written by a woman, whose main subjects are masturbation and sexual fantasies.
The night I went it was Danny Brown, nicely bemused as the fantasies, drawn from the writer’s “toolbox”, unscrolled on the page as he read: they involved a slightly surprising arrangement for Elizabeth Bennet, and a fairly obvious being kidnapped episode (that’s to cope with being in bed with someone she does not fancy). She – I am guessing anonymous is not Caryl Churchill – makes her point about male hegemony fairly effortlessly. It is not a hard case to make. Will we have reached equality when “tosser” and “wanker” seem as likely to refer to women as men?
• Manwatching will be at the MAC Belfast, 18 June; Latitude Festival, Suffolk 13-16 July; and at Roundabout at Summerhall, Edinburgh festival fringe, 4-27 August
