The Sex Party
Menier Chocolate Factory | ★★✩✩✩

The Menier’s welcome return is with a new play by the veteran dramatist Terry Johnson which, for much of the evening, looks and feels like classic Alan Ayckbourn.

Four middle-aged couples convene at a house in Islington for a sex party. Gilly (Lisa Dwan) and Jake (John Hopkins) are nervous sex party virgins while hosts Alex (Jason Merrells) and his much younger, uninhibited partner Hetty (Molly Osborne) are confident swingers.

So too are shady American businessman Jeff (Oscar winner Timothy Hutton) and his Russian wife Magdalena (Amanda Ryan), while Tim (Will Barton) is more interested in drugs than sex unlike his vampish partner Camilla (Kelly Price).

There is much bickering between the couples and it comes as little surprise that what is really exposed here other than some of their flesh is an unhappiness that erodes these relationships. Whether monogamy or promiscuity is the cause is not really explored.

Meanwhile the sex, you may be relieved to hear, happens off-stage in the living room, leaving the play’s focus, like all the best parties, in the kitchen.

Jason Merrells, Amanda Ryan - credit Alastair Muir

Jason Merrells and Amanda Ryan (Alastair Muir)

Here at least Tim Shortall’s detailed design is typical of the Menier’s top-notch production values.

Yet any expectation that Johnson, who also directs, has created an Ayckbourn-esque comedy revealing what goes on behind the net curtains of suburban England (or this being Islington the wooden shutters of a Georgian townhouse) proves to be way off the mark.

With the arrival of the final guest Lucy, her transgender identity is a challenge to the heteronormative assumptions of everyone else present.

This is particularly true of Jeff for whom the presence of anyone who was born male but no longer identifies as such, or who is not heterosexual, is objectionable.

Against Jeff’s alpha-male aggression Lucy (played by Iranian transgender activist Pooya Mohseni) is a calm, articulate disrupter.

And so the kitchen becomes a heated debating chamber for today’s red-button culture wars, tackling head on issues of identity, pronouns and the extent to which much transgender activism feels for some like an assault on women.

In this regard Dwan’s Gilly is probably closest to representing JK Rowling’s position. But the level of the debate here is not exactly elevated by the reductively alpha-male Jeff, for whom everything hinges on whether or not Lucy has a penis.

None of the arguments aired here are uninteresting. But the people expressing them are.

There is doubtless a fascinating play to be written about transgender activism; the people who conduct it; those who oppose it; others who feel threatened by it; and the sections of our society who are liberated by it. But this play isn’t it.