After Sex, Arcola Theatre, stage review: ‘Simply crafted but staggering’
Antonia Salib and Azan Ahmed in After Sex. Photograph: Jake Bush
Sometimes you stumble down a flight of stairs into a basement and are gobsmacked. That wasn’t meant to sound dirty.
Also, technically we didn’t stumble, as my editor organised the tickets weeks in advance, and other people were there, including The Hobbit’s Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman).
I’m getting sidetracked. My point (vaguely) was that the most unassuming shows can floor you.
Siofra Dromgoole has penned such a quiet, razor-edged little masterpiece and everyone involved has fluffed their feathers in equally dazzling form.
Her sixth piece follows ‘HIM’ (played by Azan Ahmed), a damaged, bisexual, guilty son, and ‘HER’ (Antonia Salib), a damaged, ever-talking, firecracker, in various post-coital vignettes. This is pillow talk in its purest form, with a little bit of workplace spice thrown in.
Simeon Miller’s lights flicker romantically, and the two bump uglies and talk about their feelings. They leave only once to do drugs in a club, and then hilariously come home to have sex and talk about HER’s favourite rock. The rest of the show is completely bed-based.
But it’s the how that’s so impressive. Dromgoole’s prose is pepper-tongued, jumping from poetically wreathed to gloriously filthy and frank-mouthed. Intimacy director Stella Moss and director Izzy Parriss find elegant ways of staging pleasure without nudity and awkward dry-humping.
They focus more on the sounds of sex, with spotlights on tense faces, blackouts and moans – all very warm-collar-inducing.
Many of us will have been in the sticky mess of no-strings sex. Nowhere is this better shown than Salib’s performance. Her character is distrustful of her feelings, herself and her desire to have children. Ahmed, on the other hand, is a man crushed by his fear of commitment. He is unsure where his bisexuality will take him, and again is on the fence in regards to babies. Flawed, fearful and utterly fantastic characters.
Although the energy does dip towards the end, with elongated “dance” sequences that spin around rather pointlessly, these are just flies in the silicone-based lubricant. The image of the two sitting in bed, scrolling on their phones, and HER saying “I’m so glad we can be bored together”, is an image (hopefully) all of us will instantly recognise.
Thankfully, though it verges into rom-com territory, we are safely in the real world. Orgasms are not always achieved and when they are, they leave marks on the sheets. Sex’s far-reaching consequences are explored with adult bravery.
There may or may not be a happy ending, depending on your view, but this smart snapshot of the intimate lives of young people never gives us the easy road. The mess of sex, relationships and humanity are loving traced in the sand, and then washed away with the inevitable tide of time.
Rare is such a view so simply crafted but so breath-snatchingly staggering.
After Sex runs until 3 August at the Arcola Theatre in Dalston.