What if no one had the legal right to refuse any person's request for any sexual act? Would this new law produce a new breed of equality? These are the questions at the centre of Gaudeamus, the new play by Peter Morris, set on a Vermont campus where students make and enforce their own laws. Written chiefly as a series of monologues by three characters, we are invited to leave prejudice aside and watch this play with an open mind to the possibilities.
The audience enter the production at the Arcola in East London as Lynette (Chipo Chung) pauses between pillars to read a book, self-consciously and unconvincingly. In only a few moments she will come forward to talk directly to us, introducing herself and the audience as strangers "because that's what we are". Lynette is intended, according to Morris's script, to come across as "confident, charismatic and breathtakingly intelligent" but instead she seemed twitchy and immature. The pace at which Chung delivers her monologues seems set in the first few sentences and her character is equally unmoving. She is the force behind the social experiment, but starts out, and remains, ignorant of the darker effects of her new "law".
Had Chung played the role with less enthusiastic naivety, the plot would have been a little more believable. Brad (Travis Oliver) and Helen(Kika Markham) achieved noticeably stronger performances. Brad is a golden retriever-esque college kid, straight out of the American teen college movie, obsessed with sex and completely self-absorbed. Helen, although a 68-year-old virgin with an apparently liberal background, was played in a way that this bizarre sexual anomaly didn't distract from the composed Professor of Classics who enjoys conjugating verbs in bed.
Having opened the play with a request to the audience not judge to, not to form stereotypes and not to expect the expected, I was disappointed in the cardboard cut-outs Morris presented throughout this play. Not only the main characters (blond jock, black radical and witty prim professor), but all the other characters mentioned seemed to have been observed from such a distance that their individual characteristics had been lost; the ugly Goth, the confused gay and many more, but for me the most shocking, a woman who has had a double mastectomy who is portrayed as completely sexless now that she has no breasts.
Article comments
1 - Theatre goer
While the published verion of Gaudeamus DOES suggest the character of Brad should be blond, the Arcola production has not cast it in this manner, and what I can only assume was a guess at the running time of the production is laughably inaccurate. Perhaps Mrs. Inglis - Hall should actually stay to watch more than the opening few minutes of productions she puports to be qualified to write reviews about?