A much-welcome return for Sugar Coat and its bracing honesty about intercourse and sexuality is a big hit at Southwark Playhouse
“We are going to tell you a story about a woman”
As if extra proof have been wanted in regards to the enduring significance of the VAULT Festival, Lilly Pollard and Joel Samuels’ Sugar Coat rocks up and rocks out at Southwark Playhouse. Sneaking in at 2020’s VAULT, simply earlier than the primary lockdown hit, I used to be an enormous fan of the wedding of gig-play and scorching story, so to see it return in an expanded kind was an actual delight. And it has misplaced none of its pop-punk vitality, its uncooked edges nonetheless current because it provides up a bracingly frank story of intercourse and sexuality for a younger girl coming of age within the late Nineties. Make no mistake although, it’s as cheek-stingingly related to this point in time as something we’ve ever seen in a theatre.
The area is taken up by a cracking all feminine and non-binary band – Rachel Barnes, Eve de leon Allen, Dani Heron, Anya Pearson and Sarah Workman – with frontwoman Heron main us by means of 8 vastly youth for our fundamental character. It’s a story interspersed with Riot Grrrl-inspired songs, which play off a lot teen angst but in addition permit uncooked emotion to be evoked as the arrival of sexual maturity coincides with the brutal realities of a misogynistic world. Check out the content material warnings as you enter, for there’s some severely heavy stuff right here however the fantastic thing about Celine Lowenthal’s manufacturing is that it by no means enables you to put on that weight for too lengthy.
There’s one thing extraordinary – and it actually shouldn’t be so – in Sugar Coat’s exploration of recent sexuality, within the calmness and conviction with which it depicts what society too usually deems unconventional. Stepping outdoors of the heteronormative sphere is not any small feat for anybody, anyplace, and the significance of optimistic reinforcement ought to by no means be underestimated – it gladdened my coronary heart that there have been no guffaws at a sure second right here. What can also be significantly bracing is how the present offers with consent and the way our understanding thereof isn’t essentially exhausting and quick, it may evolve and be formed by circumstance and expertise.
Our protagonist scoffs on the notion of consent on first contact, laughing at her nervous boyfriend’s makes an attempt to make sure she’s comfy. But when that alternative is violently taken away from her after an assault, it is just by means of the re-examination of what consent means, and may allow, that enables her to lastly begin to unlock the harm from that trauma and reclaim her sexuality. It won’t appear a lot however it’s blisteringly efficient in its presentation and to my thoughts, must be important viewing for highschool PSHE courses. Hell, I’d even go as far to say that Macbeth ought to be given a relaxation for a few years as Sugar Coat ought to be on the drama curriculum as properly.