Performance art, with its rejection of mainstream performance conventions, is not to everyone’s taste. By definition, it requires a lot more input from the audience, and the reward you get out is tied to the effort you put in and your understanding of the context. Similarly, the reward is likely to be unique and gratifying because each person absorbs the work through their own filter of experiences.
The action of Claudia Vyvyan’s I Love Sex / You Love Sex takes place on and around a double bed in a catastrophically messy, windowless bedroom—think Tracey Emin’s My Bed and throw in several teenagers’-worth of detritus.
This space is where Rema-Mae and Irys appear to be captive and form an enforced friendship. Through a sharing of histories, sexual experiences and emotional upheavals, they come to understand each other and make a connection, though I admit to not doing the same, feeling if anything that I had less and less in common with these young people as the narrative progressed.
I considered the women who inspired their characters, Clytemnestra and Lysistrata, but I was unable to trace the legacy of these ancient Greeks, the former a wife of Agamemnon who, it is said, murdered her first husband and their son to free her for marriage and who in turn she murders together with his new chattel Cassandra, while Lysistrata is known for organising a wives’ sex-strike in order to end the Peloponnesian War.
Vyvyan’s text emerges in segments, like extracts from different conversations patched together—with the deliberate bedroom setting and the intimate nature of the topics, it feels voyeuristic—but patterns surface. Themes around power and sex, the tension between emotional need and lust and the dissonance between reality and what makes sense are all thought-provoking, with the juxtaposition of the scenes and the beat of repeated phrases forming a collage that warrants further reflection.
Rema-Mae and Irys, still bonded but now in friendship, find a route out of the imprisoning bedroom. I feel I reached no similar bridge to the writer’s intentions, but my journey was not wasted.
I Love Sex / You Love Sex is part of SE Fest, a new festival based in south east London to promote and celebrate new writing co-hosted by two award-winning theatres, The Bridge House Theatre in Penge and The Jack Studio Theatre in Crofton Park. SE Fest 2024 runs until 14 September.