Writer: Harriet Waterhouse
Director: Kaarina Kendall
Sex Chat Granny may not be the best title for this one-woman show. Yes, we get sordid tales about the men who call up and pay for the protagonist, played by writer Harriet Waterhouse, to talk dirty to them. She’s good at aural sex, she tells us. But when she’s not acting as a dominatrix or pretending to be a passive damsel from Arthurian times, she navigates middle age and loneliness. The result is an unexpectedly beautiful and fragile examination of loss.
Although she calls one of her clients “mouse-cock”, she has a great deal of sympathy for the men who ring her sex line. She thinks that Gerald is probably lonely and lays his dead wife’s nightdress next to him on the bed as he chats to Waterhouse’s character. He calls her twice daily; once in the morning and once in the evening. Often, he just gets to talk as she cooks and then eats pasta. She surmises that his dead wife’s teeth didn’t fit properly and that she slurped her way through meals. Our sex worker trusts that her silent chewing must come as a relief to poor old Gerald.
These kinds of wry details pepper the script ensuring that the details about her phone calls never feel smutty. She understands that the men she talks to are as probably as lonely as she is. And these are not the only calls she makes; every day she talks to her mother in the care home she has been in since she had a stroke. Her mother can no longer speak and so the daughter does all the talking, relating the events of her day, never asking questions which can never be answered.
When she runs out of things to say, she makes them up, like she does with her clients. It’s only when she puts down the phone, sorting out her grandchildren’s socks, that we see the real woman who worries that her life is over, her bucket list unfulfilled and the memories of her husband mainly regretful. These moments, when she acknowledges her solitude, are the best in the play.
Waterhouse is utterly convincing throughout the 45-minute show, easily moving between sex goddess and dutiful daughter, always lying but always being human. Waterhouse totally deserves the standing ovation for her understated performance, full of kindness and empathy and yet she subtly reveals the devastating emptiness in her character’s life.
While much of this kind of sex work has moved to cams, surprisingly sex phone lines still exist and there’s something fittingly old-fashioned about this older woman making money in this way. But she could probably make more with an OnlyFans account. However, she never mentions this option, perhaps favouring the anonymity of the phone calls and the opportunity to be whoever the men on the other end of the line want her to be.
Sex Chat Granny is Waterhouse’s first show and it’s one of the best in this year’s Camden Fringe. Cleanly directed by Kaarina Kendall and wonderfully performed by Waterhouse, this bittersweet show certainly has a bright future.
Runs until 11 August 2024
Camden Fringe runs until 25 August 2024
