by Laura Kressly
Leah loves life. She works in a Saville Row shop and shares a flat with her best mate. It gets even better when she meets Ben Cavendish, a new customer at work, and things starts turning into a real-life fairytale. But real life isn’t a fairytale – awful things happen and endings aren’t always happily ever after.
by Laura Kressly
Whether you like or not, time and technological developments are marching on, impacting every aspect of our lives – including sex and relationships. Nessah Muthy’s new play proposes that soon the technology behind life-like robot Sophia will combine with hyper-realistic sex dolls already incorporating AI. In the world of the play, most people choose to buy themselves a made-to-order companion that satisfies all of their needs.
Rape culture is real. Victims are blamed, perpetrators are excused and conviction rates are low. Of reported rapes – estimated to be less than 20% – only 3% are deemed to be false accusations.
A giant moose terrorises a South African village. A fifteen-year-old girl falls victim to her father’s vices. An introverted policeman makes a new friend. A village is changed forever.
Though the fringe is still often gloriously lo-tech, more shows and venues are embracing and exploring the role technology can play in live performance. New Zealand-based Zanetti Productions’ Jane Doe and China Plate’s The Shape of the Pain are powerful, challenging productions that use tech in different ways from each other, but it is essential to both and enhances the productions’ impact.
Originally a novel by Emma Donoghue that swept up the award nominations last year after being made into a film, Room is now a play. Adapted by the writer for the stage, it stays true to the original story of a young woman abducted at 19 and imprisoned as a sex slave. After two years in captivity she gives birth to her son Jack. Five years later as they celebrate his fifth birthday, all Jack has ever known is the inside of the shed. To ensure he copes, Ma’s taught him that the only things that are real are what’s inside the room. Everything outside isn’t real, and the pictures on their telly exist only in the small box. But Ma’s had enough and wants Jack to help them escape now that he’s big enough.
Some questions for women:
Is it ok to want to be fucked?
Does wanting this oppose feminism?
Is it ok to want to be hit in bed? Will this man expect that from other women?
Is it ok to fantasise about being raped? What does this mean if I’ve been raped?
Louise Orwin is asking big questions about female sexuality and desire, but she doesn’t have the answers. There are no definitive answers anyway, just individual experiences. To make Oh Yes Oh No, she interviewed dozens of women around the country and found some disturbing patterns – about 90% of the women she met had been raped. Many of them developed rape fantasies. Women struggled to reconcile their feminism with wanting men to dominate them in bed.
