Review: Playing Love. 'Truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style'

After the excellent Closer which (ironically) began the academic year, Aidan Monks texted me that to make up for its disappointing heterosexuality he was going to do a queer love story next; a proper sexual square dance. Arcadia happened in the middle, but we’re here now and it was worth the wait—Playing Love, written by Aidan Monks, directed by Maisie Michaelson-Friend and Annabel van Grenen, and produced by Sofie Van Natta, has easily my favourite student-written script I’ve encountered here at St Andrews, and also everything else about it is all very good as well.

ID: Emily Christaki, Geordie Coles, and Jonathan Stock. Credit: Hannah Sabu.

If you think about it, an awful lot of St Andrews student productions are sexual square dances (a phrase burnt permanently into the front of my mind since Closer), and I’m not just talking about what people get up to behind the scenes. A Midsummer Night’s Dream was even two sexual square dances in one! I don’t even really know what a non-sexual square dance is supposed to be except that it’s probably American (maybe that explains the proliferation of sexual ones here). Disappointingly however, Playing Love fails in its brief: it is not all that much of a sexual square dance, but instead a sexual trio of ‘oversexed seminarians’ and a solo dance by a doomed lesbian also seminarian with whom no-one wants to have sex at all (she is honestly so relatable).

ID: Emily Christaki and Tatiana Kneale. Credit: Hannah Sabu.

If you think about it, an awful lot of St Andrews student productions are farces (the genre this play intentionally identifies with). But outside of St Andrews the genre of farce is quite dead and decomposed and has been for a long time, because its characteristic celebrations of posh decadence and convoluted wit, and lack of genuine interest in real-world concerns such as money (cabbAAge, as the characters here say) except as arbitrary plot motivators to be solved at a flick of the wrist, feel Victorian and outdated, and also farces are very difficult to write well and not everyone is Oscar Wilde (quotes from whom I will sprinkle throughout this review as a sort of mood board). These issues are noticeable in Playing Love, but I’m middle-class and overeducated enough to very comfortably ignore them, as is probably the entire rest of the audience.

‘The God of this century is wealth’

Here at St Andrews we certainly love putting on plays that make fun of posh people, despite being one of the most private-schooled and poshest universities in the country. However posh and terrible you are, it is always possible to imagine people posher and worse; so we see here, as the actors struggle to contort their mouths around the poshest accents they can think of, with every final syllable of every word changed to an ooeaaaaaaaaargh.

‘Only the shallow know themselves’

The important thing is that whereas most St Andrews plays try to pretend they’re about real people who could possibly exist, Playing Love celebrates its own fakeness. It’s about a group of impious impossibly impractical priest students nearing the verge of graduating from priest school and afraid of leaving ‘the bubble’ and having to be serious and live in the real world (honestly an excellent metaphor for St Andrews life) or it’s about Truth and Will and Doubt and a lost Paradise, or it’s about admitting you love people.

‘As a method, realism is a complete failure’

At a basic level, the idea of posh people going to priest school and having polyamorous gay sex is funny. They are artificial people with ludicrous concerns about artificial things they don’t really believe in but take very seriously anyway. They wear serious black and priestly dog collars and silly underwear. They fit within the three classical unities of tragedy – the play even happens almost exactly in real time, a sure sign that it isn’t real. They inhabit an artfully messy apartment scattered with intellectual books and many Holy Bibles (including a truly remarkable two-tone lavender set), and an impossibly green and flowery and droopy and comfy-looking sofa (Clara Costa-Vergara, Vida White, and Jennie Park) around which everything revolves and on which many shoed feet jump (disturbing). Jazz music plays and the sound of bells is heard, which also is not real but is instead being produced by Willa Meloth via QLab.

‘The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible’

Onto the actual cast. The central throuple is composed of Geordie Coles’ himbo ‘Spanker’ Philip, Emily Christaki’s manic pixie dream girl Matilda, and Jonathan Stock’s incurable romantic Jeffrey. Geordie strikes dramatic poses and looks plaintive, Emily is overcome by tragic emotion and falls backwards onto the sofa, and Jonathan gets extremely stressed and squeals, and they all flirt outrageously with each other and admire a miniature bust of 18th-century Methodist theologian John Wesley.

‘Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others’

Arrayed against the profoundly wicked menage a trois is serious-minded good person ‘Squirrel’ Celeste, played by Tatiana Kneale. Squirrels may look innocent enough, but they are actually vicious and liable to bite you. Celeste, like everyone, wants desperately to marry Matilda, but she can’t talk normally without reading quotes from her notebook. Tatiana is the best of all the cast at the instant emotional switches this play constantly demands, injecting a seething outrage into her voice whenever she’s talking to the men, and switching on a dime between loving pleading, fury, and precise pedantry. The scenes where she is there to stand exactly upright and react against the other three running chaotically around her are all the best scenes, with the exception of when Jonathan moans ‘we’re both naked’ when no-one is naked, which is actually the best scene.

‘Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life’

ID: Geordie Coles, Jonathan Stock, and Emily Christaki. Credit: Hannah Sabu.

This play is not as good as The Importance of Being Earnest (the sexual square dance to which it most obviously invites comparison), but it tries very hard to do all the good things Earnest does while also being entirely its own and unique, and I admire it for that. I have a very soft spot for this style of writing. It’s extremely interested in words and their meanings and repetitions, and a very Wildean merging of the ultra-sophisticated with the banal. Its jokes are not entirely consistent but there are enough of them that it doesn’t matter, and it builds up to really excellent and inventive climaxes, and through all its absurdities it manages to be genuinely moving and interesting and even profound (even if it's mainly profound about the issues of horrifically posh people). It is also effortlessly queer without making a fuss about it, for which I admire it even more.

Unusually for a PYK/Staat play Playing Love didn’t receive a standing ovation, even though it’s the one I think most actually deserved one. The constant breakneck perfection it demands is possibly not suited for the realities of student drama, but in terms of its genre and ideas alone I think this is maybe the perfect St Andrews play. So since perfection has been achieved hopefully everyone can now move on from writing about rich people (but keep writing about gay people please). See you next year!

other erin