Review | ‘Shopping & F**king’ at London’s Lyric Theatre
By Will Stroude
Shopping & Fucking
first premiered in 1996 at the Royal Court. Although writer Mark Ravenhill denies it was ever a scandal, its content was visceral enough to merit his inclusion in the so-called ‘In-Yer-Face Theatre’ gang alongside contemporaries like Sarah Kane. If Shopping & Fucking was not as shocking as it’s now remembered, it was certainly a theatrical sensation, and so it was with anticipation that we visited its current revival at the Lyric Hammersmith.
Visceral was very much the word for this production. From the start Jon Bausor and Tal Rosner’s surreal cartoon-like design grabs the attention: two vast screens field a backdrop of livid, neon green. It’s a consumer-mad world that we’re entering (or perhaps seeing reflected), and symbols of dying capitalism abound upon the stage: a pub slot machine flickers, a transparent piggy bank shrine eventually becomes a deeply powerful image.
We did wonder if director Sean Holmes’ decision to programme this play, with its explicit references to analingus and drug-use, was in part related to the modern chemsex craze. And despite the bag of E’s seeming a little dated twenty years on in a post-mephedrone scene, there were links to be made. However what seemed to be more interesting to Holmes’ startling vision, was the neoliberal agenda that has seen consumer-lead individualism transcend connection.
Little could be more relevant to the modern day, given how much further the advent of social media has plunged us into the rabbit hole. Holmes portrays our obsessive relationship with videos, selfies and the technological self by having live cameras on the stage, that splay the actors into looming visions upon the screens. Cleverly, the backdrop is often used as a green screen to superimpose nightclubs and other backgrounds behind the characters.
Sam Spruell plays main character Mark with a fittingly bewildered charisma. Mark is a man lost in this world, trying to recover from a heroin habit, and his therapy has taught him to avoid intimacy. For, he says, you can get addicted to people too. Yet this is no straightforward ‘addiction’ play: Ravenhill crafts a savage, sometimes breathtaking universe of the absurd. Robbie and Lulu are the couple Mark once bought for £20 in a supermarket.
Alex Arnold has a difficult job with Robbie, whose anger at Mark’s withholding of intimacy is written as childlike need. However, Arnold manages to consistently engage, and especially shines during one of the play’s most memorable speeches about smiling strangers and ecstasy. Sophie Wu is astonishing as Lulu. When I first read Shopping & Fucking a decade ago I remember Lulu having little effect on me: yet Wu imbued her with wit, endearment and life.
Black humour prowls through the text, and Holmes draws it out most with the awesome Brian: an unhinged messiah, the dealer, a reteller of Disney plot lines as quasi-religious myths. Ashley McGuire effortlessly commands all within her sight, be it cast, crew or audience. And David Moorst’s manic rentboy Gary, who pops out of a box as a kind of broken purchase, gives the most disturbing strand of the play a despair that never strays into the emotional.
In other plays, a lack of emotional connection would be a high criticism. But in the plasticised, relentless realm of Shopping & Fucking, it is the charred ready-meal-for-one that smoulders where a heart should be. Money has become intimacy. People are trash. Blood is spat across the stage, and drinks are thrown over girls. We belong by our bodies, rather than our souls, in the play as Holmes literally places audience members onstage – at a cost, of course.
Shopping & Fucking is full of dramatic excellence. There are moments of searing tension, that make the audience squirm in their seats. Ravenhill’s writing remains fresh and sharp, and a series of visceral images are etched into the consciousness long after the harsh lights go down. It will make you wickedly laugh, but is unlikely to ever move you to tears. For feelings, like all else in Shopping & Fucking, are now only commodities to be sold or bought.
Rating: 4/5
‘Shopping & Fucking’ is at London’s Lyric Theatre until November 5 2016. For more information and tickets click here.
For more deals on tickets and shows visit tickets.attitude.co.uk.
Words: Patrick Cash
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