Mother Clap's Molly House (review)

Mark Ravenhill's new play is in many respects fun and impressive. This may sound like ample achievement for a play that many--including Ravenhill--present as camp and playful. Ravenhill bills Mother Clap as a "play with songs" and sets it largely in a Molly house--or prototypical gay club--in eighteenth-century London and at a gay men's underwear party in twenty-first century London. The National Theatre's publicity posters (pictured) show a heaving-bosomed woman dressed in be-jeweled period costume looking knowingly at the camera as she tightens the corset on an otherwise naked, muscular young man with his backside to the camera. But, as with Shopping and Fucking (1996), Ravenhill intends the apparent glibness of his title and superficiality of his situations to be just that--apparent. In both plays, he aims to present not just titillating action, but also cultural critique, particularly of the relationships between sex and power: the commodification of sex, the relationships between economic, sexual and gender oppression, and the hegemonic disciplining of genders [End Page 163] [Begin Page 165] and sexualities. It is in fulfilling this critical ambition that Mother Clap's Molly House--both as a play text and in this world premiere professional production--is, for me, least successful. While it goes some way toward developing a critique of sexual and economic exploitation, it simultaneously exploits its own sexualities with inadequate self-reflection, parading pretty young men half-dressed in period costumes in a jolly romp revue apparently aimed not at building critique but at separating the grateful viewer from his supposedly superfluous pink pounds

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