Laura Eason’s Sex With Strangers was first staged by Steppenwolf in the States eight years ago. Altogether concerned with registering a particular moment, it is like a fax: urgently delivered and rapidly fading.
Two authors – a bestselling hunk, who has specialised in selling himself through erotica, and a diffident, academic beauty – are snowed up together in a writers’ retreat. They swap writerly anecdotes, spar and have sex. Eason’s dialogue is full of iPads and ebooks and trolls. It is mostly unsentimental about the ways writers talk – about fashions in publishers, and reverting rights – and well aware that a prime form of seduction is to quote someone’s work. But it is sloppy in its supposedly high-minded reaches, slipping into book-programme-presenter-speak when it allows a supposed wary sophisticate to talk about an author’s lovely use of language. It is altogether canny in its action. Scene after scene ends with a gauze curtain descending as the couple strip off and straddle.
In Peter DuBois’s amiable production, Emilia Fox slips around the stage as swiftly as an eel, even when wearing five-inch stilettos. Theo James comes easily in and out of smoulder-mode. Both maintain ambiguity about their professional and personal motives. Both deserve stronger, more enduring material.
