Awkward Conversations With Animals I’ve Fucked

Another issue, another set of shows itching for social overhaul. Is it just me? Is my subconscious searching this stuff out – or is it the only thing that artists are interested in talking about? Right now, I could probably walk into Haggis Haggis Haggis at the Scottish Storytelling Centre and find someone inciting a proletariat uprising.

Because, face it, you don’t expect a call-to-arms from a show called Awkward Conversations With Animals I’ve Fucked (three stars), and yet that’s pretty much what you get. In fairness, playwright Rob Hayes delivers exactly what his title promises: that is, stilted post-coital chats with a menagerie (or trois). For an hour, Jack Holden stands onstage in his tighty whities, squirming and twitching, and discusses the birds and the bees with, well, the birds and the bees.

However, there’s more to it than that. Awkward Conversations’ animals are basically red herrings. With each of his conquests, Holden’s character grows in confidence. He starts small, with a pet dog, but becomes ever more adventurous and unapologetic. Between each scene, he scrawls the species on the back wall, bigger and bigger, bolder and bolder. He settles into himself and finds a patter with his partners, but he also becomes more and more romantic. A one-night stand with a stray cat becomes a romantic weekend in a rural barnyard with a goat.

In other words, this soft-spoken, sweet-hearted young zoophile learns to commit – both to his lovers, and to his chosen, verboten lifestyle. When the sirens approach, he grabs a screwdriver and braces himself to fight for his right to fuck whatsoever he so pleases. Society can go hang. He’s going the whole hog.

Admittedly, the writing doesn’t always deliver the guttural laughs you might hope, and it overplays its ambiguity, but it’s a great little gesture of a play.

The same goes for Mark Ravenhill’s Show 6 (three stars), written for the Lyric Hammersmith’s Secret Theatre company. Knotty ideas outweigh its somewhat effortful execution, in both the writing and the staging.

Ravenhill slams two mismatched vocabularies together: a young man has run over a “chav” in the “favela.” With one sentence, we’re in a hybrid of Britain and Brazil. The twentysomething (Steven Webb) is a high-street hipster in gold hotpants, absolutely a product of consumer capitalism, and yet here he is, discovering that his real parents were disappeared by a military junta.

And just like that, Ravenhill equates Thatcherism with the military dictatorships of 1970s Brazil. Both, he argues, whitewashed over the past, eradicated any alternatives and left an undissenting present. What Brazil’s military junta did with fear, ours managed with cheap consumer goods and a mantra of happiness at all costs. The words of David Cameron and, before him, Peter Mandelson, ring in your ears: “We are all Thatcherites now.”

Caroline Steinbeis delivers a swift, sparse, in-the-round staging, with her cast in swimwear as if basking through a life-long holiday. The peculiar physical performance style, though intriguing, mostly serves to obscure an already slippery text though, and Ravenhill’s play spins off the rails as our hipster hero attempts an insurrection, only to collapse back into familiar comforts.

So what would it take to make us change our ways? Nothing short of a miracle, if you believe Jacqui Honess-Martin. Her play, We Have Fallen (three stars), part of the IdeasTap Underbelly showcase, wonders whether anything can disrupt the path to globalisation.

Twelve planes have dropped out of the sky, inexplicably, all at once; one of them, with eerie coincidence, right by the Russian border. Hundreds are dead and thousands more, stranded, as planes are grounded worldwide.

Three intercutting monologues converge on one another: aeronautical engineer Jennifer, charged with investigating the black box flight recorders; frequent flyer and hedge-funder Richard, stuck in a Moscow hotel bar but determined to get home somehow; and Pam, an soulful eco-activist camped at Heathrow in protest against the third runway.

There’s more than a touch of JG Ballard in all this, particularly in its sense of society as we know it teetering on the brink, and the sudden shift in the laws of physics. Like Ballard, Honess-Martin invokes an end-game scenario and writes with a sharp eye for detail, but her text doesn’t gain a huge amount in performance, particularly given her own stand-and-speak staging. Still it’s eloquent and poetic, and it ends on a note of dogged, defiant optimism.