5 Guys Chillin’ at the King’s Head Theatre.
There are some pretty sensationalist headlines out there about ‘chemsex’, the growing gay subculture of combining sex with multiple partners and drugs which dramatically reduce inhibition:
Addicted to chemsex: ‘It’s a horror story’ – The Guardian
Chemsex: The alarming new trend of 72-hour drug fuelled sex sessions – The Telegraph
What You Need To Know About Chemsex – Unsurprisingly, it’s really dangerous. – Huffington Post
And the voices from the public and sexual health frontlines justify many of the worries. Though combining drugs and sex is very common (alcohol, anyone?) and can have serious consequences, the hard party drugs being used (and frequently injected) at ‘chillouts’ by groups of men who may not know very much about each other’s sexual history have led to a massive increase in individuals reporting to sexual health clinics and several reported cases of overdoses and deaths.
With the slightly less sensational title 5 Guys Chillin’ I expected Peter Darney’s verbatim drama to examine these dangers but also provide a context for the chemsex scene – and it does, to a certain extent. Over 50 hours of interviews are condensed into 5 voices, each a hair’s breadth from being self-contained characters. This distinction creates a powerful verbatim texture – it allows for fantastic interplay between the performers, summoning up the ‘PnP’ (party and play) scene with shorts (‘easy access’) and leatherwear, simulated drug use and simulated sex, while the five voices can more fluidly recount a wide variety chemsex experiences, often extremely bad ones, with a few glimpses of the positive aspects of the scene in between.
Cael King has perhaps the most cohesive identity, recounting the words of a Pakistani man who goes behind his wife’s back to attend chemsex parties. He is the outsider – least familiar with the world, and at risk of being excluded because of his race. Michael Matovski and Elliot Hadley present primarily as two partners in a poly triad, the offstage third of whom ‘isn’t into the scene’. Both seem largely happy with their current relationship, enjoy sex as ‘a lifestyle’, and both talk about heavily negative experiences: in previous BDSM relationships and in the German party scene. One talks about attending a party with a large group of HIV-positive men and recounts that he ‘didn’t care much’ about whether he contracted it or not at that time.
As these darker stories are told 5 Guys Chillin’ nevertheless resists descending into utter horror. While they talk about the often reported reluctance or fear of ‘sober sex’ after sex on methanthethamine (‘tina’), methedrone, GBL or GBH, the only addiction any of the voices talk about is, gleefully, their love of cum, or piss.
The openness, and cheerfulness of almost all the confessions in the piece, enhanced by the loose conceit that these conversations are taking place at an actual party, and therefore are spoken to an audience of exclusively gay men – is a highlight, and these cheeky, happy moments are both what distinguish the play from the reporting about chemsex, and are key to learning about a subculture that is so fraught with sensationalist bad news. We do not choose the prevalent or alternative ‘scenes’ that are readily available to us, and many of us do not need to think of our dating or hookup norms as scenes at all. But Darney is reluctant to overplay any good news. He unites the five voices in reflections on loneliness at the heavy ending of 5 Guys Chillin’ with one voice unconscious centre-stage, another bleeding, and a couple lost in stoned sex on black plastic sheeting. It’s a bleak image to file past back into the bar at the King’s Head, but a powerful one, of a demographic of men young and old, successful and unemployed, desperately seeking intimacy, finding that this batch has been cut with powdered glass.
5 Guys Chillin’ is on until 27th February 2016. Click here for tickets.
