Rehearsals: the view from the back

Ready for movement... And two weeks to showtime...

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Fantasies: Afterglow @Swkplay

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Nowadays no self-respecting gay play can be staged without full frontal nudity of some kind. It feels like the default response for the modern gay play now that gay rights are no longer an issue .   Afterglow, currently playing at Southwark Playhouse , serves it up in spades. From the beginning, three men are in a bed, naked. There’s what appears to be a very brief exhalation of ecstasy, before the obligatory rush to the shower. But the gratuitous nudity and excellent performances can’t conceal this is a pretty conventional and predictable story about a fantasy couple.  The three men in the simultaneous orgasm at the start of the piece are Josh, Alex and Darius. Josh and Alex seem to live in a New York world where they can afford a rooftop apartment in Manhattan while holding jobs as a theatre director and a grad student in chemistry. As writer S. Asher Gelman based it on his own experiences, perhaps gay plays with full frontal nudity are the way to achieve financial ...
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Gay Gore: Sex/Crime @sohotheatre

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At a point early on in Sex / Crime, the lights go dark in a room covered in plastic with a rubber floor, and all you can hear are the screams. The mind is left to imagine just what pre-negotiated terror is unfolding. Until it becomes clear, nothing is happening, and we can all laugh. Part tease and part terror, the piece unfolds against a backdrop of gay fetishism and modern-day neuroses. It’s currently playing at the Soho Theatre upstairs. Written and performed by Alexis Gregory, he’s visiting a man with a specialism, who goes by the name of A (Jonny Woo). He provides a service of reenacting the works of famous gay serial killers for the right fee. Just the thing for a man who is bored with his life and searching for the next extra special thrill.  With the promise of experiencing what it was like to be a victim of one of these killers. Or as close as far as health and safety regulations allow. If gay serial killers and the people who fetishise them seems a queasy topi...
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Buttocks up: Derrière on a G String at Kings Head Theatre

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A show with a title called Derrière on a G String conjures up all sorts of expectations about the type of smut that you might encounter. And what flesh might be on display by some unsuspecting performers. But fortunately, we’re at the Kings Head Theatre in Islington, not some seedy location elsewhere in London, so there isn’t much to fear. What we have is a mostly silly dance-and-movement spectacle set to classical music.  If there is a way to describe the piece, it would be: a day in the life of a young man (played by Sammy Moore), surrounded by his friends, told through dance and movement and comic sketches. There’s waking up in the morning and getting to work, waiting for a bus, builders on a construction site, swimmers getting a bit frolicsome, and party goers getting nasty. Things take an interesting turn with ladies shaving in the bathroom and men tap dancing while farting. It all is done in the best possible taste, with only the occasional flash of a buttock. Moore has a na...
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