THAT sedate old theatre, the Royal Lyceum, is a pretty torrid place right now. At the start of this year’s Edinburgh Festival it staged Anthony Neilson’s Realism, about a couch potato whose masturbatory fantasies involved two girls and a lavatory. Now the theatre is presenting Barcelona’s Companyia Teatre Romea in Platform, which begins with men watching pornography in tiny booths. Not for nothing do smiling ushers hand out leaflets telling the audience to “be aware before entering the auditorium that extreme and sexually explicit video images are shown throughout this production”.
And they are: so many and so monotonously that you wish God had provided human beings with more variegated apparatus. Indeed, sex in Calixto Bieito’s version of Michel Houellebecq’s novel is so relentlessly in-yer-face — a naked girl is present throughout, observing the cavortings on and below a bar swathed in fake zebra skin — that there is a danger of missing the complexity the French author brings to subjects that range way beyond his central one, which is sexual tourism.
The original novel resulted in Houellebecq being abortively hauled into court for promoting racial hatred. That was because it contains sharp words about Islam and ends with a Bali-style atrocity. But the novel is just as critical of European culture and Western consumerism. And so, to a lesser extent, is the play. How could it be otherwise when blubbery whites are shown feeding on needy and often very young Asian girls?
Yet both book and play are pretty ambivalent about the civil servant Michel, in Juan Echanove’s fine performance honest and intelligent, yet coarse, mottled and so sweaty that sex with him must be a sort of stygian Turkish bath. He is deeply bored with his arid life, which makes it plausible that he would go to Thailand in search of regeneration.
What is less credible is, first, that this ageing, balding Pan should chance on the sweetest, most fulfilling prostitute there; second, that he should inspire devotion and find ecstasy in Valérie, a young Frenchwoman in the same tour party. There is a touch of sentimentality behind the scepticism.
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But scepticism is everywhere. The thesis is that men care about little but bed and that European women, Marta Domingo’s all-accepting Valérie apart, lack the ease and generosity of their Asian counterparts.
The obvious solution involves sexual neo-colonialism. The result: desperation. Or are Bieito and Houellebecq missing something? As the plot advances and the questions proliferate, you notice that nobody has much to say about love. But then I am not sure that anybody here believes in a love that does not always involve multiple orgasms.
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