Patrick Cash reviews the National Theatre’s John
‘And then there’s the poo’ begins one scene in John, where gay sauna owners talk about cleaning up at the end of the night. They talk about poo in the showers; about poo dropping out of guys’ arses as they walk up the stairs; about walking around the venue by mistake with poo on their shoulder.
John is a verbatim piece and I have no doubt that the descriptions of faeces illustrated above come straight from the sauna-owners’ mouths. But any interviewer will tell you that as much as the words may come straight from the mouth, the finished piece is produced by the mind that sculpts those words.
I imagine Lloyd Newson, the man behind the show, would ostensibly argue to include these particular descriptions so as to be realistic and not to shy away from the anus’ primary, non-sexual function. I am all for realism, shit literally does happen, and we’re all human and we have digestive systems.
Yet in a good decade now of personally engaging in lots of gay male anal sex, there’s been very little shit. Definitely, no one’s ever walked out of my room with shit dropping out of their arse.
It could be argued that because their setting was a gay sauna, with its slings and passing reference to fisting, it was their angle to show the distortion that men visiting the sauna place upon their physicality. If so, this was so subtle as to fail.
To my mind, the scene instead gave the impression to the seemingly straight, white, middle-class audience that all gay sex involves a lot of relentless shit; a viewpoint you might as well have transcribed from a ‘burn the gays’ pastor in Uganda. If you want to be truly realistic, at least include a scene about douching before visiting the sauna.
But perhaps it wasn’t so much about realism as shocking Daily Mail critics and creating easy ticket sales; when Sarah Kane’s Blasted was branded a ‘disgrace’ it sent the production’s reputation through the roof. DV8 must have been spinning on their dance mats when Quentin Letts said the same thing in his review.
Certainly the inclusion of a male teacher who goes straight from the sauna to his school, and logs on to Grindr when he’s in the classroom, felt like provocative sensationalism. There was even a sense of internalised homophobia, inviting their audience to judge this amoral deviant put in charge of children. Where did the company, or Newson as a gay man himself, attempt to ask why?
Aside from the shit and shock, this was the real hollow at John’s core. It’s a three-act play, following the eponymous John’s ‘straight’ life in and out of prison for the first third, his middle-aged foray into gay saunas, and his yearning for substance at its end. The company repeatedly threw around the word ‘intimacy’ like shit in sauna showers. The real disgrace of this production was that nowhere did they ask why gay men might have intimacy issues.
Perhaps, at a push, the production as a whole was meant to leave a pseudo-Brechtian strain on the spectator. When walking out of the theatre with John’s desperate search for a connection as your last image, you were meant to analyse the first third where it gave his ‘straight performance’ growing up. But this doesn’t work; we live in a too fast-paced age.
Daily Mail and Telegraph readers are not going to dissect this production with that detail, what’s left in their minds is the shit and Grindr in classrooms. If all you’re going to reach with your preaching is the converted Guardian liberals, then why make theatre on the national stage?
Technically, John was excellent. Stylistically, it looked great. The movement was beautiful. But shame on the National, shame on DV8, and shame on Lloyd Newson, for doing nothing to negate the shame of gay men.
• John will be screened to cinemas around the UK on 9th December.
• The Lyttelton Theatre, National, South Bank, SE1 9PX
• Performance returns again on Friday 5th December – Saturday 20th December. 8pm. £15-35. 3pm matinees on Saturday & Sunday.
