F***Ing Games ( Archived )

Reviews

The Guardian (Michael Billington)

The action of Grae Cleugh’s play is every bit as explicit as its title: bags of fellatio and anal penetration. Like Mark Ravenhill, this young Scottish writer also implies that gay sex has dwindled from a symbol of liberation into a mix of power-tool and fashion accessory. Cleugh’s problem is that his play becomes as hermetic as the very world he is attacking.

Cleugh’s prime target in this four-hander is a demonic manipulator called Terrence. Once he marched across London’s Highbury Fields in the cause of gay freedom. Now he is a rich club-owner obsessed with power. And in the course of the action we see how this has poisoned his spirit. He treats his long-time partner, with whom he shares his plush Chelsea flat, like dirt. And when his secret lover, Jude, turns up with a 20-year-old Glaswegian boy-friend called Danny in tow, Terrence spends most of the evening seeking to drive them apart. But eventually the malign Terrence gets his comeuppance.

Cleugh has a ruthlessly sharp eye for the hypocrisies of the gay scene. The waspish Terrence despises suburban breeders. Yet Cleugh shows him to be a cruel snob who depends on his adoring slave while demanding total sexual freedom for himself. And when he invokes the gay community the cynical Danny, who seems to be the authorial voice, tartly responds: “Most of what I’ve caught on the gay scene has been a bunch of narcissistic, tacky, cock-obsessed sad fuck-ups who happen to share a common sexuality.”

But while Cleugh is a satirical observer of individual foibles, his play never expands into a general metaphor like Kevin Elyot’s My Night With Reg or Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking. Terrence boasts of himself that “what you see is what you get”, and that is true of Cleugh’s own play: it is the story of a conscienceless individual who uses sex as an instrument of power and pays the price. Although it is entertaining, it leaves you aching for the characters to break out of their own little world and acknowledge that such things as art, politics and society actually exist.

Admittedly Dominic Cooke’s production capably charts the internal tensions and the four actors are all very good: Allan Corduner as the spade-bearded shit, Ian Dunn as his fidus Achates, Daniel Lapaine as the weak-willed Jude and Benjamin Davies as the caustic Glaswegian. The sex and the snorting are also enthusiastically simulated. But, by the end of the evening, I was as glad to escape as Terrence’s guests and even began to long for one of those old-fashioned plays in which men and women interact on equal terms and the sex is robustly implied.

Observer (Kate Kellaway)

F***king Games is nasty, brutish and short. But Grae Cleugh writes with such assurance, it is hard to believe this is his first play. And Dominic Cooke’s gripping production does not miss a beat.

Cleugh describes gay life at its soulless worst, although through the attractive character of Danny (Benjamin Davies) he proposes some thing better. At the centre of the plot is a gay Iago figure, Terence, played with demonic zeal by Allan Corduner who wants to keep gorgeous Jude (Daniel Lapaine) to himself. Sex is a cruel game – I wish the message about love had more value; it seems as useless as a coin thrown down a well.

Telegraph (Charles Spencer)

Four-letter fun and games at the Royal Court

ANY play with “fucking” in its title and the Royal Court for its home is going to invite comparison with Mark Ravenhill’s bolt-from-the-blue hit Shopping and Fucking. And there are times when Grae Cleugh’s debut seems to be courting that comparison with all the eagerness of a teenage virgin stalking his first sexual experience.

Like its bad-boy antecedent, Fucking Games snuffles around the mean metropolis and gags at the prevailing stench of cynicism and fear: love is a four-letter word, promiscuity par for the course. Here, once more, is the reptilian older male – jaded, rich, degenerate – and the tough-acting but vulnerable youth. And here too, helping to make up the Court’s annual quota of censorship-baiting activities, is casual fellatio and a climactic act of violent anal sex.

Dwelling on these similarities only gets you so far, though. Cleugh’s first full-length effort may seem derivative and even contrived in parts, but otherwise it marks a very promising, distinctive start: keenly observed and acidly funny.

In contrast to S&F, Cleugh’s characters are all gay men; and their hurtful, hateful treatment of one another is not held up as symptomatic of the capitalist system, it’s simply their learned pattern of behaviour. The play’s explicit preoccupation with the tyrannical aspects of gay subculture – which the men discuss volubly – finally restricts its own room for manoeuvre, but I found its obstinacy in this regard strangely admirable.

Dominic Cooke’s unwaveringly sharp production brings out the bitchy, paranoid flavour of an evening’s power games chez Terrence, the middle-aged sleazeball owner of a Soho private members’ club. The usual butt of his waspish wit – Jonah, his partner of 10 years – gets sidelined as battle commences for the beautiful, faithless Jude, Terrence’s bit on the side. Jude’s new boyfriend, a Scottish DJ called Danny, craves a loving, monogamous relationship, an attitude that Terrence views with as much horror as if his guest had wine-stained his immaculate brown leather sofas.

Allan Corduner gives an enjoyably vile performance as Terrence, smiling with lordly amusement as though master of all he surveys and dispensing catty one-liners as rapidly as he gets through coke and ciggies. We guess, nonetheless, that he’s met his match the minute we clap eyes on Benjamin Davies’s fresh-faced, imperturbable Danny.

Ian Dunn as the long-suffering Jonah and Daniel Lapaine as the languid stud Jude make the most of far from meaty parts, helping to sustain involvement in an evening that’s strong on queeny authenticity, though short on dramatic momentum.