At first, The Sex Party looks like a retro BBC sitcom about swingers, although that term is banned at this adult shindig. Four couples collect for sex and nibbles at a cool north London postcode. There is gleeful talk about getting it on and a fair share of parading around in lingerie and thigh boots.
But Terry Johnson’s spiky comedy takes us from the familiar fare of smut and sniggering double entendres to something bolder and more awkward in the sex/gender debate at its centre, even if it does not reach a satisfying end.
We only ever see what happens in the high-end kitchen (set designed by Tim Shortall) but we get a vivid idea of the action in the living room from the moans and groans we hear. In a production also directed by Johnson, the acting stays fine across the board although the characters are flimsy (Lisa Dwan especially does wonders with her part) and the star casting of Timothy Hutton stays strangely marginal for too long. He drifts on and off stage, saying little and looking like a cliched California guru in yoga pants.
The dialogue often goes off on random, unruly riffs; one character (Will Barton) talks about taking MDMA and the dialogue sounds under the influence too.
The play’s grenade is lobbed as the first act closes, with the entry of Lucy (Pooya Mohseni), a trans woman, and from here on in it feels like another play altogether. Doris Lessing, in a Penguin introduction to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, wrote that what happens in the bedroom is a “report on the sex war” outside it and it seems to be the case with this living room; suddenly, no one wants to convene there and a very live tension is in the air.
Much is flung at us, from talk of toilets to language and JK Rowling and it feels genuinely edgy. It is brave of Johnson to grapple with a debate that has become so divisive that a meeting of this kind would be unimaginable in real life. But arguments come thick and fast without being explored. Johnson seems to be shooting an arrow through the issues of the day – including, too briefly, consent – but it comes to feel like a dramatised version of Twitter.
The room exposes its bigots and we finally see the point of Hutton’s character but as more plot-points are lobbed at us in the closing moments it feels much less like a sitcom than an entire series rolled into one production.
At the Menier Chocolate Factory, London, until 7 January
