Warnings come up front: "contains language and scenes some people may find offensive." Well, what's a writer to do, after he's trotted out something called "Shopping and Fucking," to maintain momentum? How's a production going to live up to its poster picture? (A woman in 18th-century dress tightens a corset with strings brushing the rectum of a nude young man -- something that doesn't even happen in Mother Clap's Molly House.)
Having germinated in a drama and music academy, the show is amazingly free of memorable songs; music is between rock and a hard dirge. The story spans two ages." In London, 1726, after whores stop renting costumes from Mrs. Tull and then her cheating husband dies, she notices her apprentice keeps walking after midnight. A transvestite, who feels peaceful in his dead mother's dresses, applies to be Mrs. Tull's new tailor. When a prosperous Madame comes to show off the country cutie just crying to be "the best fuck in London," but young men singing "to every man a mate" bypass the rigmuttons for Mrs. Tull's apprentice, she decides to take on a new name and a new business. Thus is born the venture giving title to this show.
Appropriately, the second half has two gay young men turning their loft apartment in today's London into a gay paradise. A singing Eros presides as the action swings between this and Mother's fucking places. In the old order, the new whore loves sex but doesn't want children and bloodily aborts. In the new, she's poured into a dress and pierced from head to toe, her visible menstruation of no interest unless she dresses like a boy.
There is simulated sex on many levels (double entendre intended), the extreme being that of a country boy who misses his pigs even after having a "molly" pretend to be one. Among the other pleasures of both molly houses are a near-death adventure, a game of blind-man's bluff, drag dance, faux pregnancy, leather-bound photographer. The most sympathetic gay character, Tull's old apprentice who has become Clap's naive Susan, proclaims homosexuality the wave of the future. A heterosexual marriage, the traditional ending of a comedy, occurs between partners too old to breed. But at the dance of clamjaphry, Eros comes out of a cloud.
A star goes to the appropriate costumes and sets that start like part of a pop-up book but go so far as comic surrealism.
Deborah Findley carries the show as Tull/Clap, though Danielle Tilley's outrageous new whore earns the biggest laughs. Paul Ready defines well the confusion of apprentice Martin and nicely makes a bridge to Tom. Robert Blythe seems at ease in women's dresses. The whores are just stereotypes that the actresses fit; Mollys were more individualized. Talents, in general, is wasted in this sensationalistic Clap-trap. It's the National Theatre that undoubtedly gains from provoking and pandering to curiosity.
