Some women go to Jamaica in the hope of getting laid. In the process, they get stripped not just of their knickers but also their illusions. Only those who find this shocking or surprising will, I suspect, get much joy out of Tanika Gupta's play, which suggests its highly respected author has spent too long dallying with soaps.
Even the plotlines, showing four women holidaying in a Jamaican sunspot, have a sudsy quality. Kitty, a Mancunian schoolteacher, mistakes male prostitution for real love. Yolanda, a black American, seeks relief from her stale marriage. Middle-aged Maggie is working out her hatred of men. Only mixed-race Naomi, who is looking for her unknown Jamaican father, ends up with any prospect of happiness.
Behind the play lurks a puritanical assumption I find hard to share: that there is something wicked about female sex tourism. If men can go on holiday looking for sex, why not women? Gupta's moralism shows itself most clearly in a dreadful scene in which Maggie ties up a 17-year-old lover who has failed to rise to expectations. What starts out as mild titillation ends up as a screaming match revealing the mutual hatred of both parties. You only have to imagine what Tennessee Williams, with his comprehensive compassion, would have made of such a scene to see how Gupta is led astray by her approach.
However, even if I couldn't believe for a second in the character reversals of Lynda Bellingham's Maggie, Vinette Robinson's naive Naomi and Adjoa Andoh's haughty Yolanda carry a certain conviction. Victor Romero Evans as a boat-building pimp and Javone Prince as a married gigolo also give some hint of the limited economic horizons confronting Jamaican men. But, for all its visual charm, Gupta's play is undone by its vaguely prurient censoriousness.
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