Writer: Kim Davies
Directors: Polina Kalinina and Júlia Levai
Kim Davies play Smoke teeters on a knife edge, a metaphorical and quite literal knife edge in which the decisive moment involves a sharpened instrument. This 70-minute piece with deliberate echoes of Strindberg’s Miss Julie is part of a BDSM game that explores consent, sexual violence and different kinds of power play between two vastly different people in the kitchen of a sex party. Making its London debut at Southwark Playhouse, Davies’ 2014 play tries to push buttons but doesn’t have a lot to say.
Artist John and university student Julie meet by chance in the empty kitchen of a BDSM party in New York. He’s a regular attendee, while Julie is there for the first time, hoping to explore and enjoy the sexual predilections she found men unwilling to fulfil in Ohio. When they discover a mutual connection – Julie’s father Geoff who John interns for – what begins as polite chit chat becomes a more serious flirtation.
Polina Kalinina and Júlia Levai’s production is a coy affair, replacing visual acts of sex and violence with more suggestive alternatives largely using the dirt tray set designed by Sami Fendall for this in-the-round performance. Smoking is symbolised by allowing grains of dirt to run through the hands of the characters, intimate and violent acts by the swishing and lobbing of the same handfuls of dirt across the upturned fridge that suggests the kitchen setting, around which John and Julie manoeuvre themselves. Smoke is then a grubby play in more ways than one.
It is never an entirely comfortable watch, deliberately so perhaps, but however many times Julie consents to be teased, struck or tortured, it’s impossible to escape the feeling of exploitation, of the older John at 10 years her senior taking advantage of the younger student’s fantasies, few of which she’s ever really put into practice, a line that when it comes to it is just unpleasant to watch them cross. After a while women can spot the men who insist that while others may be dangerous and predatory, they are the nice guys you can trust–except you can’t and John is clearly that man which disrupts the balance of power that Davies tries to incorporate, leaving Julie and the audience feeling violated at the end of the play.
Meaghan Martin’s Julie takes a while to come to life and in the bland interchanges in the first half of the play, Martin has little to work with. Julie is a generic American woman with a rich father and a desire to get back at him but as the story unfolds it gives Martin more to explore as Julie is able to impose herself on the conversation and later suffer for it. Oli Higginson is, though, an excellent John treading that line between disarming and threatening, a man seemingly at ease at a sex party he could take or leave but cornering a woman in the kitchen who might just advance his career, and Higginson makes him compelling.
It may be realistic, but Smoke just doesn’t quite justify its existence and there is no clear conclusion or consequences for anyone involved. Women do have complicated desires and fantasies; they go to BDSM parties and may, like the original Miss Julie consider dominant and submissive roles. Sometimes those women are exploited leaving them abused and manipulated without resolution. Davies play really wants to shock us and to push at the audience’s boundaries, but that doesn’t make it necessary viewing.
Runs until 25 February 2023
