Paradise means - to the imagination of cold, grey, pinched Western Europe - sun, sand, palm trees, clear blue skies. And that's what floats ethereally around the heads of the Englishwomen on the Jamaican beach on which Sugar Mummies is set. Floating through their minds is the idea of the perfect man - loving, caring, young, fit. Floating before their eyes are the men who meet that fantasy.
All that's needed to turn fantasy to clenching reality is a little cash. It is these transactions, the female sex tourism now understood as standard in certain small parts of the world, that are the subject of Tanika Gupta's new play at the Royal Court in West London. It seems it is a subject whose time has come - recently covered in the RSC's excellent Trade, and Charlotte Rampling's movie Heading South, about 1970s Haiti.
And Gupta could hardly have picked a better topic to produce a flood of free publicity from male-edited newspaper editors wondering what it is their wives get up to "girls' weeks away". The Daily Mail was particularly exercised by the fact that the actress playing Maggie (Linda Bellingham), the oldest and most cynical of the women, had been the face of wholesome British motherhood in Oxo adverts.
But beyond the news value, what is the value of the play, and the production?
First the play: a neat structure - too neat. There's the women: cynical old Maggie, who just wants the sex; the desperate-for-romance-and-children schoolteacher Kitty (Heather Crane); the young innocent Naomi (Vinette Robinson); and the token black American, Yolanda (Adjoa Andoh), who is knowing and wise to the ways of this world. Her compatriot among the males (and her partner) is Reefie (Victor Romero Evans), who arranges "jobs" for the youngsters on the beach. The young innocent desperate to join the game is Antonio (Jason Frederick); the old hand Andre (who perfectly meets Kitty's fantasies); Andre (Marcel McCalla) the man standing self-righteously aside from this, nursing his dreams of cooking school. Watching over it all is Angel (Lorna Gayle), Andre's mother, like a solid mother goddess who has lost most of her powers.
Article comments