Theatre review: Horse-Play

Tim (David Ames) and Tom (Jake Maskall) are a middle-aged couple who've been married for ten years and are starting to worry that the excitement might be going out of their sex lives. To try and spice things up a bit they decide to tap into one of Tim's fantasies, from the childhood memories of watching the 1960s Batman series and getting a bit excited whenever Batman and Robin got tied up by the villain. They come up with their own superhero names, make the costumes and hire a dom to play the villain, but when Karl (Matt Lapinskas) gets a bang on the head, all three of them end up stuck in an awkward situation. Now, I'm not saying Ian Hallard's new play might be benefiting from people's curiosity about the lives of famous people, but could it be accidentally letting slip some secrets about his and Mark Gatiss' own relationship?

Probably not, as Horse-Play is a pretty straightforward farce, albeit one set entirely in a sex dungeon. It locks a bunch of characters in a room filled with the most comically inappropriate tools to try to escape with, and I did like the way Hallard gradually builds the cast of characters in there to change the dynamic.

So at first Karl knocks himself unconscious, leaving the married couple to try and free themselves from their ropes and chains before trying to get out of the basement itself (no phone signal, of course,) before mixing things up by having Karl come round but with memory loss - including the pass code to get them out of the room. Much of the play is taken up with Tom and Tim trying to help him get his memories back, and there's some good comic mileage in the dominant "Villainor" turning into a helpless innocent who doesn't remember his own name.

Eventually we also get the arrival, and increasingly implausible lock-ins, of Karl's girlfriend Danielle (Stephanie Siadatan) and the dungeon's owner (Nick Sampson,) so the claustrophobic setup never really becomes that for the audience. Horse-Play is an enjoyable enough couple of hours, never spectacular but never dull either, with Andrew Beckett's production keeping up the pace and landing the visual gags. Despite the setting, the giant dildos and lube being chucked around the stage, and a couple of gags involving bodily fluids, it's also a suprisingly tame and cosy comedy, that steers clear of shock value.

So a lot of the comedy is less about sex, more about the fractious but ultimately strong relationship between Tim and Tom, and their awkward attempts to be almost parental figures to the dazed Karl (all while Tim wonders if he can still cop a feel since they already paid for it.) The biggest laughs come not from the sex toys but from the one-liners, and from Tim's encyclopaedic knowledge of Dallas and Dynasty (which the amnesia plot is a direct nod to.) If it does tell us anything about how Hallard and Gatiss spent lockdown, it's probably "rewatching 1980s soap operas and not having sex." Although if only Hallard had had someone handy while he was writing it, to tell him that the setup is a pretty direct copy of a League of Gentlemen episode (just replacing "Juliet Bravo" with "Ann Widdecombe.")

Horse-Play by Ian Hallard is booking until the 24th of September at Riverside Studio 3.

Running time: 2 hours including interval.

Photo credit: Danny Kaan / Charles Flint.