Review: AFTER SEX, Arcola Theatre

Friends with benefits. Casual lovers. Non-romantic sexual partners. They’re all terms that Google feeds you if you’re trying to define a relationship where one will undoubtedly end up catching feelings.

Him and Her are attempting to circumnavigate the exact same situation(ship). She likes that he’s slipping up and imagining a future with her; he ponders an outcome where they become a family. Neither thinks they want - or are ready for - stability. Siofra Dromgoole writes a series of post-coital scenes that push the definitions of recreational sex and romance.

Directed by Izzy Parriss, this is an emotionally literate drama about emotionally immature people. It breaks open the insecurities of an entire generation and examines them, unfiltered and without shame. The writing is blunt and sometimes unkind, shifting into erotic prose poetry effortlessly.

Dromgoole queries what intimacy really is. Is it a purely physical step, or does something more ephemeral need to kick in? After Sex isn’t a sexy play. It’s a psychological one. It stages our innermost fears and leaves them out, naked and afraid, to be judged, while the pair discuss sexually explicit fantasies whilst they barely touch in their baggy clothes. 

While Him and Her are busy wondering what they would do if faced by rope-walking cannibals on a deserted island while he’s tied to a palm tree, the alarming beauty of the millennial ennui seeps out of the commitment issues and societal pressures they experience. Dromgoole wraps it up with that fascinating, bleak non-humour that's idiosyncratic to zillennial comedy. Parriss lends it a visually uncomfortable slant, placing the action on a wooden platform in a sort of horizontal ‘E’ shape. There aren’t any beds or pillows, though that’s where most of the plot happens.

Azan Ahmed and Antonia Salib are simply magnetic. She carries herself with the shielded vulnerability of a successful woman who’s humble enough to admit defeat to herself, while he is a sympathetic bisexual man who struggles to reconcile his interiority with the world he lives in. They share a delicate chemistry, but manage to balance it with the unfamiliarity of their two characters. There’s a stunning moment when Salib is off stage taking a pregnancy test on her own and Ahmed is tasked with a figurative Schrödinger’s baby. It’s the peak of his performance.

While neither of their roles is the most self-regulating of humans when it comes to feelings, they are exceptionally self-aware. Salib is especially introspective, offering a detailed portrayal of the contemporary inner turmoil experienced by a large category of women. She also gives a cracking one-sided phone conversation, natural and fluid in delivery and shockingly believable (something that’s not exactly to be taken for granted these days).

Parriss toys with the tone and genre of the piece, tipping it into interpretative dance as trauma offloading as it develops. It might be a quick hour, but Dromgoole has ample time and wit to extend it into all the nooks of the empathetic psyche, making it an engrossing and perceptive search for answers that never actually come.

After Sex runs at the Arcola Theatre until 3 August.

Photo credits: Jake Bush

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