Good Sex review: Raw, unsettling, seductive, provocative and very, very funny

Good Sex

Samuel Beckett Theatre, Trinity College Dublin

★★★★★

“Sex is storytelling,” Liv O’Donoghue explains at the beginning of Good Sex, an ingenious and generous new production from Dead Centre that celebrates the joys of physical intimacy and the vitality of the live experience. This pandemic project from Dead Centre with the writer, academic and critic Emilie Pine turns the recent Covid past into an urgent interrogation of both our bodies and the nature of theatrical illusion.

O’Donoghue sets the scene for the production’s opening gambit. Two actors have been invited to aid an investigation into the performance of sexual activity on stage. This will be an exercise, we are told, “in how to show it, how to watch it”: consent is the key word; the actors have consented to participate, as we audience members have too. As O’Donoghue says, with real warmth and sincerity, “Thank you for taking the risk.”

To add authentic intrigue to the production, two actors who have not rehearsed or read the script have been invited to perform in the experiment. On the night of this viewing, the actors — appearing with remarkable sangfroid — are Aoibheann McCann and Rory Nolan. At the back of the stage, two stage managers sit in a windowed booth feeding them their lines moment by moment, while O’Donoghue choreographs their bodies in real time.

It doesn’t just ask questions about the visceral authenticity of live performance: it enacts the answer right in front of our eyes

Over 90 minutes a team of stagehands assemble Aedín Cosgrove’s working set around the performers, providing seats for the characters in Pine’s slippery script to kiss on, countertops for them to copulate on and, eventually, walls for them to have sex against. Despite the rules that O’Donoghue establishes at the start, there is a constant sense of frisson to proceedings, a delicious danger, as the metatheatrical frame is broken and re-established, the fourth wall built and dismantled, again and again, as the show unfolds.

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Ben Kidd, the production’s director, has created a raw, unsettling, seductive, provocative and very, very funny piece of theatre. It doesn’t just ask questions about the visceral authenticity of live performance: it enacts the answer right in front of our eyes.

Runs at the Samuel Becket Theatre, Dublin 2, until Sunday, October 3rd, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival