Writer: Sam Spencer
Director: Nina Jurković
The confessional monologue is a staple of shows that will, next month, be heading up to Edinburgh. Writer-performer Sam Spencer has crafted a tale that is ostensibly about a gay man bouncing between Grindr hookups and the prospect of a more stable, loving relationship with an older boyfriend, but has a richer storyline bubbling underneath.
Spencer’s character is smiley, self-effacing and cocksure, juggling his monologuing with answering each chirrup of the familiar Grindr message notification. As he sits on the train following one sexual encounter, he revels in still smelling his lover’s scent on his skin and wonders if other passengers can also. That particular sex session had previously been described as not entirely pain-free for him: his partner was overly aggressive, and the way he behaved in bed, “you can feel the self-hatred,” says Spencer.
But as his monologue progresses, one wonders whether that self-hatred was really coming from who Spencer claims it was. A dinner party with the ultra-conservative parents of his sister’s boyfriend sees him recede back into the closet, forcing him to recall times when he “got with” girls who flirted with him as a means of escaping having to come out.
There are happier times, too, especially when recounting his dates with Gio, an older man who lives in Lancaster, a location that allows Spencer to be a different person than he is in his native Liverpool. For someone who claims not to want attachment – instead, wanting detachment but with a spot of lingering for the intriguing after-sex pillow talk – one gets a sense of a young man who is on the verge of letting his self-constructed barriers come down.
Faith plays a large part in Spencer’s self-doubt and lack of worth. Gio’s comfortable relationship with his own Catholic faith contrasts with the protagonist’s estrangement from God. When Spencer wonders whether “He’d take me back,” we get a glimpse of a man whose internalised homophobia is rooted in the religion he was brought up to love, but which has forced him to push away from it.
A brief interlude in which explicit photos some men send on Grindr – presented as hand-drawn versions in cutesy frames and with the Vision On gallery music, a reference some three decades older than Spencer – doesn’t really sit with the rest of the monologue. There is, too, a short moment where Spencer falters and loses track of his train of thought. That he expertly folds that into his character’s discombobulation at the thought of Gio and the life he could have turns a nice recovery into a genuinely emotional beat.
The final moments of Spencer’s play reveal enough of his protagonist’s thought processes to clarify all that has gone before, yet leave enough unsaid for the sense that the character’s story is only just getting started. One hopes the same can be said for Sam Spencer’s career as a writer and monologuist, for Why I Hate My Penis shows the astute eye for dialogue and story construction that is necessary for the genre.
Reviewed on 20 July 2022
