I Promise You Sex and Violence review

A trip to the Edinburgh Fringe isn’t a proper trip to the Edinburgh Fringe without seeing at least one show during which you silently scream ‘WHY WAS THIS ALLOWED TO HAPPEN?’

But it’s not an experience I’d expected to be having so early on, at a show produced by Newcastle’s excellent Northern Stage, who have carved out a name for themselves over the last couple of Fringes with expertly-curated programmes of thought-provokingly poetic lo-fi theatre. They’ve already struck gold this year with Chris Thorpe’s fiery ‘Confirmation’. But they’ve also struck unmitigated crap with this dreadful comedy, which Northern Stage boss Lorne Campbell has not only programmed but directed.

The vibe of David Ireland’s play is kind of Robin Asquith-style sex comedy given a sort of mid-00s saying-the-unsayable shock makeover. Bunny (Keith Fleming) and Charlie (Esther McAuley) live together. He claims to be gay, but as the wank-tastic opening scene makes clear, that may not be entirely true. She claims to be a strident feminist, but as her lengthy opening speech about being jizzed on by a Tory suggests, her addiction to degrading sex may problematise her convictions. 

After bemoaning her love life at length, Charlie declares to Bunny that she’d really like to go out with a black guy – which is convenient, as Bunny’s best friend Raymond (Reuben Johnson) is black. OR IS HE? Bunny sets Raymond and Charlie up on a date, and before you know it the whole thing has descended into a horrifying mish mash of rape jokes, race jokes, sex jokes, casual misogyny and sundry other horrors.

The cast are all game enough, but they’re directed as if they were in different plays - Fleming is sort of naturalistic, McAuley is like a wildly oversexed Tamsin Greig character, and Johnson is completely demented, like a drunk person’s stereotype of an IT nerd. The result is a terrible mess, like three children loudly competing for who can say the rudest thing.

For all its crudeness, Ireland’s play actually serves as a sort of plea for tolerance of our fellow human beings. Which is nice, but it doesn’t change the fact that the medium it chooses is an hour of grindingly offensive cliches. If you think an avowed feminist lustily screaming about how she’d like to be raped by a black man sounds like the height of transgressive hilarity, then you may have found your new favourite play. If not, don’t let it put you off the rest of the Northern Stage programme.

By Andrzej Lukowski