SWEETMEAT Comes to the Old Red Lion Next Month

Exploring sadistic desires fueled by online echo chambers, childhood trauma and gay loneliness, this new dark drama from a queer-led team combines elements of verbatim theatre and folklore. Sweetmeat draws from the bizarre case of Armin Meiwes, who in 2001 advertised online for a volunteer to be "slaughtered and then consumed." The ad was answered by Bernd-Jürgen Armando Brandes and together the two fulfilled Meiwes' fantasy, videoing the event, which led to Meiwes being convicted of murder. From this strange case and using direct quotes from internet forums, Sweetmeat tries to unpack where dark fantasies stem from, and how internet culture can amplify them into possibilities. It asks questions about gay mental health, rejection and validation, and the need to be desired.

Sigmund has been tormented by sadistic desires since childhood, fuelled by online echo chambers and tenuously restrained by SSRIs. When his fiancée breaks off their engagement and he loses his flat, he moves in with Christian, an eccentric librarian with a painful past. As their shared obsessions come to the fore, their relationship mutates from companionship to love to something intense and terrifying.

Writer Ivo de Jager said, "I was obsessed with the Meiwes case when I discovered it as a lonely gay teenager. Although the crime was shocking, I could relate to the desire for constant companionship and understanding that was symbolised by the act of consensual cannibalism, particularly given my culturally Catholic background and exposure to sacrifice, transubstantiation and the spilling of blood as signs of devotion. As I aged and became terminally online, I saw similar sentiments reflected not just in other queer people, but in the art I consumed. Sweetmeat is my attempt at reconciling these disparate but connected interests, influences, and concerns in an empathetic and bold way."

Ivo de Jager is a writer for stage, screen and radio. An early version of Sweetmeat was presented at Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2017, also playing The Bunker, Theatre503 and Brighton Fringe, and his other shows include The Finest Ruin (Y Theatre, Leicester) and short plays The Department of Interpersonal Relations, Grito, The Year of the Tiger and Dante's Limbo.