Focus on: Skin a Cat

Isley Lynn wrote her play Skin a Cat “because my sex life never looked like the sex life that I saw on TV or on stage”.

In a culture as saturated in sex as ours it’s still relatively difficult to admit that you aren’t having any, or that you aren’t enjoying the sex you’re having, or that you find it painful and distressing rather than pleasurable. It can be incredibly isolating. 

Alana, the main character, has vaginismus, a psychosexual condition in which the muscles in the vagina contract involuntarily. This makes penetrative vaginal sex very painful, sometimes impossible. It’s part of a spectrum of conditions that tend to be lumped unhelpfully together as "female sexual dysfunction".

While Lynn intentionally set out to write a play that addressed the lack of understanding about the condition, she also wanted to write a funny play. Alana’s attempts to lose her virginity see her enthusiastically exploring alternatives to vaginal intercourse. 

Drawing on her own experiences, Lynn wrote the first scene years ago and then “didn’t do anything for a year because I was scared”. When she returned to the script, she wrote the rest relatively quickly. No one picked it up, so she ended up taking things into her own hands and putting it on herself. Before bringing it to the Fringe, it had a short, successful run at the Vault Festival in 2016 and was the inaugural production at London’s Bunker Theatre in 2017. 

When she tells people what it's about, many express their surprise that it isn’t a solo show, as if a subject like this written by a woman could only be explored in a certain way. But Skin a Cat does, she admits, pose quite a challenge to a director: “It’s made up of a series of sex scenes. A lot of conversations happen during and around sexual activity.”

Some directors might have sought to change this, but Blythe Stewart—who Lynn describes as “fearless”—found ways of making these scenes work. She found an answer to the question: “When we let go of the necessity to represent sex accurately, how can we represent the other things that are happening in the scene: the connection, the motivation, the sensation, without locating that in the actors’ genitals?” 

The result is more than a play about "dysfunction", it’s a play about the richness and complexity of sexual identity and experience. Young women tend to come [to see the play] and then come back with partners or relatives in tow. "I’ve spoken to a lot of women with similar experiences," Lynn says, but also “lots of older women who’ve realised they don’t have to have penetrative vaginal sex to have a satisfying sex life”.

Perhaps more surprisingly, audiences also include “lots of men who realise in hindsight that their ex-girlfriends must have had something similar. A lot of guys leave the play saying they need to go and text their ex-girlfriends.”