Theatre review: Fucking Men

A big fringe hit a few years back, Joe DiPietro's Fucking Men is a take on Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde, the controversial 1920 play about a series of one-night stands that form a circle of people who find different kinds of comfort or release in sex. I don't think DiPietro's is the only version to have ever made the leap of adapting the story for gay characters, but it seems to have been by far the most successful. Past productions have been quite luxurious in their casting, with a different actor playing each of the ten characters, but some things have changed since 2008, including fringe venues' attitudes towards actually paying actors, so for Steve Kunis' revival at Waterloo East we get a cast of four, taking two or three parts each. Alex Britt, Charlie Condou, Derek Mitchell and Stanton Plummer-Cambridge are the cast taking on a series of variously sexy, funny and sad scenes.

So we begin and end with Britt as a rent-boy; in the opening scene he has a regular spot outside an army barracks which has proved very lucrative for him. Plummer-Cambridge's curious squaddie turns violent on him after sex, which isn't a first - what is, is him returning the next night to apologise.

The soldier's sexual experimentation continues in a sauna in the next scene, and we continue to hear about it occasionally throughout the rest of the play's encounters. These take us all the way through a married couple whose open relationship is meant to help keep them together but might have the opposite effect; a bisexual and hugely sexually confident college student; and Condou's journalist from an older generation, who advises a star actor to stay in the closet because things haven't changed as much at he might think, and his resigned cynicism may not be misplaced.

The funniest scene is between Britt's porn star with a romantic soul and Mitchell's insufferably pretentious, terminally unsuccessful playwright. The former gives us some great nonplussed reactions to the latter's flamboyant pronouncements, and there's a self-deprecating humour to making one of the play's bitterest characters a failed playwright who announces that the worst thing that could possibly happen to a writer is success. Then again, DiPietro was less successful when he wrote this than when he wrote Diana the Musical, so many a true word.

Obviously the show sells itself on the sex, and Kunis' production does feature some fairly enthusiastic scenes (with intimacy direction by Lee Crowley,) as well as the obligatory nudity - mostly rear, although there's quickFULL FRONTAL MALE NUDITY ALERTsfor Britt and Mitchell. But these aren't the main focus - DiPietro is interested in the conversations before and after sex, and the sex scenes are usually to the side of the stage, with the focus on one of the other characters, repeating key lines from their own scenes.

But there also remains an interesting variety in the way the play and its characters deal with sex - I think the top note of this production is the different things it can mean for people and the different responses. These include some scenes of coercion and physical violence, but also more psychological manipulation, like the way Plummer-Cambridge's actor mistreats the playwright. DiPietro has done some rewrites for this latest version to bring it more up to date - there's references to Onlyfans and the scenes dealing with HIV have inevitably taken on a slightly different tone. It's not an extensive reinvention though, and while maybe not as fresh as it was when it debuted, Fucking Men still entertains and even challenges, more than the attention-grabbing title might make you expect.

Fucking Men by Joe DiPietro, based on La Rondeby Arthur Schnitzler, is booking until the 18th of June at Waterloo East Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Darren Bell.