ID: Matt Clegg, Iris Hedley, and Natalie Urusov. Credit: People You Know.
The concept of a viciously sex-negative pharmacist choosing to work in a university town. The concept of a group of friends linking up in the waiting area of the Boots pharmacy. The concept of spending an hour shopping in Boots . . . actually, I can understand that last one a little better. Last week, I spent centuries hunting for lip balm in there while the minutes crept towards 5:30. Soon the aisles began to darken one by one. Awed by how much time I had wasted, I left. Foiled again.
Fortunately, Hard Pill, a new People You Know play by Loulou Sloss, is the opposite of a waste of time. There’s nothing like picking up an embarrassing prescription in Boots to remind you that all the world’s a stage, as suddenly friends/acquaintances/lecturers/partner’s exes stream in en masse to observe you; and the production, which is directed by Sophia Hattiangadi, wisely understands this principle. As a result, an undercover trip to pick up the morning-after pill becomes a terrifying, confessional odyssey into the farcical sex life of your average St Andrews heterosexual. Lindsay Martin and Chloe Annan’s set consists of the pharmacy window, three columns of condoms hanging beside it, and three chairs, facing out. And, as if to underscore the (sexual) panopticon point, our venue is the Heritage Museum (so no stage or lighting designer to speak of), and capacity has been increased with the help of several large carpets, so that the audience comes right up to the actors’ feet. Barron fire safety, where?
It’s not as if sparks fly in Hard Pill, though. The only character with the remotest sensuality is Hanna (Liv Douglas), who spends the play roaming the store, increasingly laden with food, and lamenting how pasties in the UK are designed for prim British nipples—way too small for her. Though she’s still pure comedy, Liv plays her with an admirable appetite, and she seems to “get it” much more than the three in the chairs: the sexually experienced, Plan-B-seeking Astrid (Iris Hedley), the prudish Sonia (Natalie Urusov), and virginal Harry (Matt Clegg). Also, she apparently flirts with everyone (this bone-chillingly straight play sent me scavenging), and her louche disregard for how anyone reacts to her makes the rest of the characters look like relentlessly self-tailoring neurotics. Hence: an unsexy play about sex, in which kissing is “rubbing our oily mouths together like we were making a vinaigrette”; orgasms go unwitnessed, because men look disgusting having them; and “Wanna come back to my place and touch?” passes for a pickup line. Hard Pill suggests that people fail at sex even when they succeed in having it because they can hardly get out of their own heads enough to get into their bodies.
I feel like I haven’t yet seen another student production in which the costuming so clearly conveys personality. AnneGray Oxrider’s costumes mirror the St Andrews “types” represented here: Hanna’s pattern-mixing, bohemian layers; Astrid’s recognisable uniform of long coat, straight-leg jeans, off-the-shoulder top, and bulky leather tote bag; Sonia’s schoolgirl outfit. (I can’t remember what poor Harry wears.) And, if we could forget that what we were watching was essentially farce, Aubrey McCance’s imperious Pharmacist is done up like a panto dame, in a lurid red wig and blue eyeshadow reminiscent of Gladys from Weapons (an icon of Gay Halloween, by the way). Aubrey channels the dame’s typical bawdiness into sexually explicit slut-shaming, continually reminding Astrid of the obviousness of condoms (we can all see them! They’re right there in front of us!). I like how his Pharmacist pops up from below the window, as if she spent the play crouched there eavesdropping, to announce the remaining runtime (a.k.a., how much longer until Astrid gets her pill): “Twenty-five minutes!”
In this clinical setting, under bright light, sex loses most of its mystique, its atavistic power. For Sonia, what’s thereby exposed is her secret conception of sex as sacred. It might be difficult to take her seriously as a gullible puritan, but Loulou and Natalie imbue her with a psychological complexity that leads to one of the play’s main insights. Meanwhile, Matt, who is a great physical comedian, makes Harry lovably oafish, though he’s also resistant to learning anything new about himself. What are we to make of the fact that he’s a virgin because he gets girls but doesn’t know what to do with them, or that he spends his entire time onstage working his way down an (in this context) extremely phallic sandwich? (In appetite, only Hanna rivals him.) As for Astrid: though she coaches her friends in the rituals of courtship, she seems as hopelessly naïve as them. I wish the play had made her interrogate her own notions about sex more rigorously, like the idea that wanting to do it without a condom means a guy is falling in love with you. If anyone could discuss that with her, Hanna probably could; but she rejects Hanna for people who don’t know anything, which may have convinced her that she knows it all. Maybe that’s the hardest pill to swallow: that even once you’ve emerged from the inchoate darkness of virginity into the community of people who have sex, it’s still the blind leading the blind, more or less.
That’s a reference that only those who have entered the community of Hard Pill viewers will get. Luckily, at the time of writing, there will be four more opportunities to see it (including two matinees—how professional!). Come prepared to visit One-Liner Land; you won’t want to miss a single one. The more uncomfortable a situation is, the funnier it gets. In that respect, this Hard Pill goes down easy.