Lust orders

November 5, 2004
Director Katy Alexander lets Rupert Reid hog the limelight. Photo: by Edwina Pickles


There may be lots of sex in Sleeping Around, but don't expect any cheap thrills from this confronting production. Jacqueline Maley reports.

Until November 28. Tuesdays 7pm, Wednesdays to Saturdays 8.15pm, Sundays 5.15pm
Belvoir Street Downstairs Theatre, 25 Belvoir Street, Surry Hills
Bookings 9699 3444

Rupert Reid is famous. At least, he is among the readership of Asian TV Hits, a British magazine that interviewed him recently. "They did a poll of their readers and said of all the stars of yesterday they wanted to know about they wanted to know about me," he says.

Reid's notoriety in Britain is due to a stint on the ABC series Heartbreak High in the mid-1990s. Since then he has played a cop on Blue Heelers (the upstanding Constable Jack Lawson) and has had roles in The Matrix: Reloaded and The Matrix: Revolutions.

In this role he plays a professor in Sleeping Around who within five minutes has more sex than many people would have in months.

You might call Reid a successful working actor. Except Reid, like the rest of the cast and crew of the Belvoir Street production, will not be paid for Sleeping Around because it is a co-op production, meaning the cast of 12 and director, Katy Alexander, will split the profits. This is heartening, as the play deals with the search for love and intimacy in a material world.

"It's looking at the other side of relationships we have and delving a little bit deeper," Reid explains.

The play, written by controversial British playwright Mark Ravenhill in collaboration with three of his contemporaries, Hilary Fannin, Stephen Greenhorn and Abi Morgan, is part of the "in-yer-face" tradition of British theatre. It uses provocative language and behaviour, aims to shock and unsettles its audience with extreme emotion.

"[The playwrights] really go into the headf---, the not-knowing and the jealousies and insecurities we have in our relationships," Reid says.

And they don't skimp on the sex, either. It's everywhere in the play, linked inextricably with the motivations people have for doing it. Some use sex to escape, some in a grasp for intimacy and others use it to avoid intimacy.

"You've got this amazing palate of humanity drawn out over these 12 scenes of people making love, fighting or bickering or flirting or trying to manipulate each other," Reid says. "It's the whole gamut of our darker side, but put in a fairly natural light."

The play is written "in the round" - inspired by Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler's 1900 classic La Ronde. Two characters play a scene together, then one character is pushed into the next scene with a new person and so on, like a theatrical barn dance.

The theme may be old-fashioned, but the playwrights' perspective is modern. They make explicit the link in our culture between sex and commercialism, and the tendency of some people to commodify relationships, or treat them as transactions.

In the first scene, Reid's character and a female marketing executive watch as a soft drink logo is projected onto the moon: a symbol of romance colonised by the forces of marketing. "[The play] talks about the important thing being human contact over commercial imperialism," Reid says.

Director Katy Alexander says she was worried about how she would handle the explicit subject matter of the play. Other directors have used nudity in the sex scenes, but she decided against it.

"I don't think the play needs it," she says. "If you put nudity into this play, it probably becomes more shocking, but it also becomes more banal."

When she took on the project, Alexander knew it was a priority to make her actors comfortable despite the play's explicit nature.

"I think it's just about making the environment safe," she says. "I wind up sharing a lot of experiences from my own life, because they're the ones up on the floor, they're the ones exposing themselves."

Her job was made easier by excellent writing, she says. "Initially, with a couple of the scenes, because what was going on was disturbing in a sexual manner, I was worried it was going to be too strong," she says.

"But that's the brilliance of the playwriting - you end up seeing the vulnerability of the character who might appear to be in control."

Although it is a fine balance, the playwrights never strip their characters of humanity. Ultimately, Alexander says, the play reasserts the human need for things such as intimacy, touch and love.

"It charts a beautiful journey through a whole range of emotions for the audience and arrives at somewhere at the end that feels quite complete," she says.