Shopping and F***ing

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It tells the story of Gary (Antony Ryding), a 14 year-old rent boy who ran away from home after being repeatedly raped by his step father. However it seems this experience with his step father has effected him so bad that he finds he needs hard sex and to be dominated to get pleasure. He befriends a punter called Mark ( James Kennedy). Sean Holmes, director: I thought what was really interesting about it was how prophetic the play was. There’s the element of everyone telling stories about themselves, which obviously the internet and social media allows you to do to a far greater degree, and the way it’s very hard to avoid everything becoming a transaction in a world that is a capitalist mono-system. I think that theme feels very contemporary and more in the spirit of the age than it was even twenty years ago. Po jeho dráme Faust (is dead) som k nemu pociťovala určitý odpor - je to tenučká kniha, no trpela som pri nej. Nechutné, šokujúce, desivé, trpké, obscénne, veľa wtf momentov, zvláštne, príťažlivé, vtipné, silné... But, right at the end, there’s a moment: Robbie has a look on his face. I’m not sure if it was the actor or the character I connected with, but suddenly I got hit by all of this empathy and compassion, feelings I hadn’t had the whole way through. I felt sad, and a little hopeful. Maybe because it turns out that I’m more sensitive than I thought, and maybe I cared about Robbie all along and maybe that means we all care a little more than we think we do.

Playwright Mark Ravenhill was educated at Bristol University where he studied English and Drama, and worked for the Soho Poly in London. Which can lead to failures of the imagination. Suppose, for example, in all innocence, you don’t know what the three little dots actually stand for. Suppose you think the play is entitled Shopping and Saving . Well, you wouldn’t be rushing to see it, would you? But The New York Times , extremely thoughtful as always, filled in the dots for us in its review of the play, lest there be any misunderstanding. Explaining “the gerund that completes its title, Shopping and…,” The Times pointed out that it’s “a form of a much-used but still widely unprintable Anglo-Saxon verb referring to carnal intercourse.” Consumerism is set to be the invisible power which makes the world go round and money is its fuel. As a result, all moral codes and ethical values are being obliterated. Love, intimacy, beauty the most sacred virtues are denied and replaced by the mere lust for money and power. The pursuit of happiness is transformed into the pursuit of cash. In scene fourteen, Brian remembers a story from his childhood when his father had asked him what the first words in the Bible were. He recounts his father telling him “Son, the first few words in the Bible are… get the money first. Get. The Money. First.” We have reached that time of our social evolution when we have to press pause on our busy schedules and have a moment to think about what being a human actually means nowadays. Do our wealth and expensive things make us better people, or is it the compassion we have for others? Is the value of money more important than the value of a human being? Are modern relationships built solely on pursuit of personal interests and overwhelming desire to satisfy personal needs? Can a real relationship actually flourish in the midst of a decaying, wretched, hollow world, run by hypocrisy and vice? We suddenly find ourselves on the verge between what we think is right and what society tells us to be right. Thus we continually lose the grip of our own identity and understandings. Examining the depths of such social, political and intimate dimensions, the play ends with a prophecy of the future. It is not a happy ending. It is a dark and depressing assumption that our world will continue its devastating downfall, if humankind continues to praise the destructive equivalence: money = happiness. Happiness this way! Work Cited Intimacy at a price … Sam Spruell (Mark) and Sophie Wu (Lulu). Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The GuardianAre all Ravenhill's plays like that? I'm still processing how I feel about it. Great concept, shabby execution. I actually appreciate how the play plays on the whole consumerist society, and how relationships are manoeuvred in a neoliberalist culture/society. It's smart enough but not mind-blowing. Surely, it can be done better. It reminds me of Tracey Emin's 'My Bed' (1998). It's a brilliant concept, but not much effort innit? And personally I'm just someone who appreciates effort is all. Vytkla by som asi to, že je toho dakedy až príliš. Autor sa v texte - na celkom malej ploche - snaží spraviť všetko, len nech to má ten „Och, preboha, to čo má byť!" efekt. Text je prehustený metaforami, nechutnými a smutnými scénami, úzkosťou a hraničnými situáciami. Postavy majú veľkú sexuálnu slobodu, filozofia ich života sa krúti okolo sexu, lásky, drog, okolo slobody a peňazí, sú poznačené kapitalizmom a chcú stále viac a viac. Don't let the title put you off,this 90's play dealing with a society bent on money and sex tell a dark tale of the problems which arise for those who have little material wealth and whose relationships twist and turn. Littered with characters who survive on microwave meals,dealing in E ,telephone sex and adventures with 'rent boys' as well as coping with nasty drug dealers this play paints a very dark side of life in the 90's,but I suspect one that is known in some small detail to quite a large proportion of the population.

And I take you both away and I take you to my house. And you see the house and when you see the house you know it. You understand? You know this place.And I’ve been keeping a room for you and I take you into this room. And there’s food. And it’s warm. And we live out our days fat and content and happy.” Ravenhill’s play is both distinctly of its time, in the way it skewered the bleakness of Thatcher’s legacy on a generation of youngsters, and yet also prophetic. It neatly reflects the anxieties and monetary obsessions of youngsters living in a post-financial crash world where you are what you own; where even intimacy comes at a terrible price or must be avoided at all costs; and where loneliness is corrosive. “Are there any feelings left?” muses Mark on his odyssey in which he tries to reduce everything to a transaction only to discover that love gets in the way.Sensing Others through Dancing Bodies as Data: Review of Sense Datum by UBIN DANCE 26th November 2023 S odstupom času som ju však nevedela dostať z hlavy a vtedy mi došlo, že som asi zošalela, lebo v živote potrebujem viac jeho tvorby. On the other hand, The New York Times favors the ‘it doesn’t exist’ formula. It has prudishly renamed the play Shopping and …. Everyone does it, no one will name it! The Times doesn’t even give it an asterisk or two. Three little dots must suffice. “How was it for you, my darling?”“That was the greatest three little dots I ever had in my life!”

Rule number one. Never believe a junkie. Because a junkie is a cunt. And when a junkie looks you in the eyes and says ‘I love you’ that’s when you know he’s gonna fill you full of shit.” The acting was adequate but at times looked a little amateurish. I particularly liked the character Lulu ( Kate Ashfield), she is the flatmate of Robbie and the character Brian ( Robin Soans), a weird drug pusher. LH: It’s important to see the play in the context of all the fantastic new work that was coming out in the Nineties from people like Mark, Sarah Kane, Joe Penhall and Martin McDonagh. It was an extraordinarily fertile time for playwriting – and the audiences for these writers were very young, or at least becoming much more mixed.

Its Legacy

It made me think a lot about the difference between want and need. We’re living in a selfish age and we’re all falling victim to the belief that “I’ll be happy when ...”. I’ll be happy when I get those trainers and that boyfriend and that amount of money in my bank account and that postcode and that number of likes on Facebook. We’re chasing the want but not fully knowing what we need. And that can so easily get ugly because of all the things you might do in the pursuit of happiness. Yes. Yes. I’m teaching. You’re learning. Money is civilization. And civilization is … say it . Don’t get frightened now. And civilization is …” Plot-wise, nothing in Shopping and F**king that takes us to a new place: The addictive Mark falls in love with Gary, who doesn’t want to be loved, and this pisses off Robbie, who’s in love with Mark and is so anxious to be loved in turn that he gets Lulu in trouble with Brian…and so on.. We’ve been here plenty of times and, for fleeting moments, it does get old. But Ravenhill’s stylish junkies, prostitutes, and hipsters trying too hard to make their own rules tell a somewhat different story. They speak with a raw, painful honesty. Their emotions are like open sores. Ve sanırım uzun zaman önce büyük öyküler vardı. Öyle büyük öykülerdi ki, tüm hayatını onlarla geçirebiliyordun. Tanrının ve Kaderin Güçlü Elleri. Aydınlanmaya yapılan yolculuk. Sosyalizm Yürüyüşü. Ama hepsi öldü ya da dünya yaşlandı, bunadı ve tüm bunları unuttu. O yüzden şimdi hepimiz kendi öykülerimizi uyduruyoruz. Küçük öyküler. Farklı şekillerde. Ama her birimizin bir tane var. Ravenhill kritizuje krutosť systému, nastavuje zrkadlo konzumnej spoločnosti - robí presne to, čo si predstavíte v modernej literatúre, keď sa povie, že autor je rebel, anarchista a chce šokovať všetko a všetkých. Možno by som označila Ravenhilla za divadelného Palahniuka - lebo nikto iný, kto kritizuje spoločnosť s drsným humorom a jeho scenérie sú temné, chladné a až tak nepríjemne známe, mi momentálne nenapadá.

Lulu (Sophie Wu) and Robbie (Alex Arnold) have been ‘bought’ by Mark (Sam Spruell), who in turn buys the services of young rent boy Gary (David Moorst), while the couple must also prostitute themselves to pay a debt to the loquacious, menacing Brian (Ashley McGuire, superb). Emotions have been replaced by transaction: you pay for sex, you pay for companionship, you pay for drugs, you pay to feel. Nobody is sentimental, though some people are starting to fray at the edges as feelings of loneliness and abandonment bubble away beneath the façades.

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His next play, Faust Is Dead, was produced by the Actor's Touring Company and toured nationally in 1997. It was followed by Handbag in 1998, which won an Evening Standard award, and Some Explicit Polaroids, which opened at the Ambassadors Theatre, London, in November 1999. In 1998, while literary director of Paines Plough, a company started in 1974 to develop new writing, he organised 'Sleeping Around', a collaborative writing project. In Ravenhill’s view, in a modern retail economy characterised by dispersal, there is no more factory floor where workers can find common cause. Instead, we find in his plays a concern for ‘micro-politics’, the finite local struggles championed by the French thinker Michel Foucault, who appears thinly disguised as Alain in Faust is Dead, waxing philosophical in the desert outside Los Angeles. In Handbag, meanwhile, the plot centres on the politics of fertility and care, as two couples, one gay, and the other lesbian, attempt to conceive and then care for a child. The baby, through the neglect of child-minders, dies. The play therefore acts out a common anxiety fantasy of affluent parents while pointing out the exploitation of inexperienced carers who bear the burden of nurturing the offspring of the wealthy. Handbag interweaves this modern tale with an imaginative prehistory of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, taking the perspective of the exploited Miss Prism, who was also a failed child-minder in her time. I was reminded of something someone once said to me: capitalism needs shame in the same way that politics needs fear. It made me think about the primal, human need to be part of the tribe. Shame is the fear that you’re not worthy of love and connection. Capitalism is preying on that idea – buy this and you’ll feel good, wear this and you’ll feel good. It fuels that sense of shame that we’re not already enough. It’s so dangerous on a worldwide level. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-04-12 12:00:46 Associated-names Rebellato, Dan, 1968- Boxid IA40086504 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier Ableson is terrific as the self-involved Mark, setting a high standard as he reprises his role from San Francisco. Fortunately, under Edwards’ direction the rest of the cast has no problem meeting his level. Malkasian is a devastating Robbie, pathetic at one moment and pathological the next. Parris is just super as Lulu, the character with at least one quirky foot touching the ground. Steven Klein is an appealing Gary, and Reed’s Brian is both funny and frightening in his analysis of civilization and Disney feature films.