The Sex Party. The Menier Chocolate Factory.

Terry Johnson’s The Sexy Party does a solid job in exposing the reactionary nature of partygoers at a ghastly Islington gangbang.

It is probably best to start by saying there is an awful lot of sex going on in The Sex Party. Considering the thin pickings Johnson’s almost comprehensively unedifying characters bring to the mix, we can be thankful all of it happens off-stage. Instead, like all the best (and worst) parties, we end up hanging out all evening in the kitchen of aged priapic lothario Alex’s (Jason Merrells) sleek and well equipped Islington home, which he shares with accommodating, proudly sex-positive lover Hetty (Molly Osborne). It is the kind of house with a firepit and pond in the garden and expensive Persian rugs at risk of staining in the sex room.

Only this is not an Islington most Londoners would recognise. It is too white, conventional, and heteronormative for that. This is more like a sex party that a home counties Tory constituency party would arrange as a summer fund-raising event: a gathering to fill the coffers before the real excitement of conference season starts. Nobody seems to be having much fun here at all here, something I imagine is probably also true of many Tory fundraisers.

Alex’s guests are a rum lot. There is bossy, uber-liberal feminist Camilla (a suitably terrifying Kelly Price, demanding Alex explain why no black people have been invited) accompanied by her pill-popping jellyfish of a husband Tim (Will Barton, channelling his devilishly good impersonation of our erstwhile Prime Minister from the Park Theatre’s recent The Last Temptation of Boris Johnson). Rugger-bugger Jake (John Hopkins) arrives determined that he and gin-guzzling wife Gilly (Lisa Dwan) are only there to watch, but as the drinks flow it seems she has other ideas. Add in Trumpian, ponytailed American businessman Jeff, and his vampy Russian former sex-worker wife Magda (a gloriously OTT turn by Amada Ryan that is the highlight of the evening), and you have the makings of decidedly white-bread orgy. No wonder Alex describes the evening like mixing up shopping “from Waitrose and Iceland”.

The first half is a slightly slow but periodically funny bedroom farce, given welcome momentum with juicy alcohol-fuelled revelations of just what is wrong in each couple’s relationship. None of the eight characters (aside perhaps from Hetty) it the least bit likeable. Perhaps Johnson feels it necessary to suggest something has to be wrong with these people for them to come to a sex party in the first place. If so, it feels a little unfair on all those happily sex-positive and entirely blameless Islington types who presumably habituate real-life events.

Towards the end of the first half a further guest arrives in the form of the glamourous and immaculately attired Lucy, a fashion stylist Alex chatted-up on a west end shopping trip. She is not sure she should be at a party like this, and it is fair to say the surprise she brings with her adds a touch of boat-rocking spice to previously vanilla events. *Unfolding events reveal the other attendees to be closer to puritanical killjoys than liberated sexual adventurers.

Johnson’s second-half exploration of gender politics is laid out effectively enough, although I doubt whether people in the habit of going to sex parties are quite as freaked out by different lifestyles as the author thinks. But in the end, the writer’s meticulous determination to air all sides of a contentious subject makes The Sex Party, feel like a cop out. I just wish he would make up his mind which of his characters, if any, he thinks deserves our sympathy.

Writer and Director: Terry Johnson

15 November 2022

Duration: 2 hours, 30 mins. One interval.