Writers: Ruthie Rado
Director: Zachary Wilcox
British drama has been fascinated by sex in suburbia for 60 years, imagining the sordid shenanigans that take place in the most respectable of streets. Ruthie Rado’s play Spills joins Abigail’s Party and Sex Party in unpicking the physical and emotional entanglement of three people who meet for casual, if highly specific fetish, sex in a flat in Finsbury Park. A site-specific piece which invites audience members to a real living room in the London borough, Spills proves a little too big for its venue.
Three people – Dude, Chick and Gal, meet at the man’s flat to agree on their expectations and boundaries for a proposed future encounter. Weaving between their backstories, pre-existing relationships and sexual expectations, this conversation-heavy drama examines the pros and cons of non-monogamy, sexuality and sex with strangers.
Although the invitation to ‘Dude’s Flat’ in a side street between Finsbury Park and Manor House may seem intimidating, this turns out to be a very polite and respectable, very middle-class domestic environment in which you are asked to take off your shoes – so wear appropriate socks – and invited to use the flat owner’s private bathroom containing their toothbrush. But it is a useful scene setter for the slightly awkward interaction to come, a nice juxtaposition of ordinary suburban life in which the group prepares themselves for a wacky threesome. The environment evokes the behind-closed-doors feel that Zachary Wilcox’s production aims for – but make sure you climb the stairs quietly and don’t disturb the neighbours!
Spills itself is an overwritten drama however, running at around 95 minutes with a beginning, middle and end sequence in which Dude (Sam Law), Chick (Alana Hillenaar) and Gal (Ashlin Green) spend more time agonising and providing expositional backstories than actually having any kind of sexual contact. Although the characters talk for about an hour, insisting that nothing will happen, the drama does rely on them overcoming their reluctance. And at the end of Spills, we hardly know them any better; the man is a cliched up-for-anything straight man, the others an ethically responsible yoga lover and a kooky American with anxiety issues, yet the discussion never progresses beyond these simplistic categorisations.
When they finally get going it is a surreal blur of themed sexual adventuring that should not be spoiled, although it is never clear whether the scenes are a coy proxy for sex or the substance of the group’s mutual attraction. Either way, it all comes in such a rush with so many elements at a similar pitch of weirdness that it’s hard to feel comedically satisfied by the turn the show takes here. This is not helped by the scale of the performances, particularly Green’s Gal who vacillates between nervous and seductive well but needs to become a little smaller to suit the intimacy of the tiny venue.
A final section of the play proves the most interesting, incorporating audience members who give consent to participate in scenes in which they openly share their own experiences of non-monogamy and sexual experimentation. What Spills lacks is purpose both for the characters who are left inconclusively mulling over the evening they had together, as well as for us who leave the Finsbury Park flat unsure whether we know any more about suburban sexuality than we did before.
Runs until 17 December 2023
