All the Sex I’ve Ever Had

All the Sex I’ve Ever Had
By Tina Fance, Alice Fleming & Darren O’Donnell in collaboration with the performers. Directed by Darren O’Donnell. Mammalian Diving Reflex. Melbourne Festival. Arts Centre Melbourne, Playhouse. 12 – 15 October 2017

Aren’t people amazing?’ the Companion whispers as another bit of someone’s sexual history is narrated from the stage.  She’s right: they are amazing.  Such experiences, such memories!  And to look at them, would you even suspect?  On stage, six ‘seniors’ – three women, three men – all over sixty-five, are lined up behind microphones like a panel for a Q&A after a show, complete with an MC (Moses Carr, a mere twenty) to one side. 

But this is the show: a weird but familiar, sad but funny, matter-of-fact but voyeuristic, banal but enthralling, and – if you’ve an imagination - strangely erotic telling of tales – from birth to now and on into how they imagine the future.

It’s not ‘theatre’, but it is performance.  The life stories that Lionel, Brenda, Noel, Beatrix, Suzie and Philip tell are their stories, but the influence of selecting, shaping hands (i.e. the writers’) is evident.  Each of the six has a script in front of them and there’s a smooth and clever rhythm to the way the stories start, pause and interweave.  Suzie, with more than a brush with the show business behind her, is the most polished – and racy - performer, but Beatrix, the oldest, is the anchor and we all fall in love with this tiny woman with the pixie cut and the calm voice laced with irony.  Lionel, an opera buff and the only gay panellist, lists multiple-and-then some sexual encounters and exotic travel for more as if to say, ‘So?’  But most of us are aware that Lionel came through the worst of the AIDS time unscathed.  Brenda has had a pretty wonderful life: varied partners, travel, learning and she’s now achieved an amused ironic calm at the whole damn thing.  Noel was a teacher who escaped the Catholic church, had to have the female orgasm explained to him, and now describes the women in his life with succinct, wistful and appreciative detail.  Philip is from New York, a gravel-voiced sceptic, a loner who’s had his problems sustaining relationships – although there have been plenty of them.

Whatever the selection process of these Melbourne locals is, it works well.  (The Companion overheard Suzie in the loo telling some other women that her daughter ‘dobbed [her] in.’  In a sense, these are ‘ordinary’ people, but what the show demonstrates is that no one is ordinary.  The concept has by now played in cities all over the world, including in Asia, with, as you might expect, regional and national differences, but with remarkable similarities too – such as that monogamy doesn’t seem to play a role in too many people’s lives.

The concept includes the audience.  At points, a reference in somebody’s narrative triggers a question.  The house lights come up and there are roving microphones.  ‘Who here rubbed against an inanimate object for sexual reasons?’  ‘Put your hand up if you’ve been in an open relationship.’  ‘…or a relationship that involved substance abuse.’  Members of the audience are surprisingly frank and forthcoming.  Well, the women are.  Answers to the inanimate object question get a lot of laughs.  (‘Anybody else fall in love with the rope in the gym?’)  But substance abuse takes us to tragic places and the audience falls into sympathetic silence.  Of course, different audiences will come up with different stories each performance. 

Pop songs appropriate to the times of the lives feature, and the storytelling is interrupted when the panellists, plus the producers and even the Stage Manager, get up and dance.  (I think this is meant to look spontaneous, but of course it doesn’t; it looks like something to provide a respite, but we’re so engaged we probably don’t need a respite.)  The show is not all about sex – career moves and other experiences provide context – and the details are not too specific – most of the time.  Again, it’s the women who are prepared to avoid euphemisms, but I don’t think anyone was too uncomfortable.  There are shocks, but they are momentary.  But perhaps the show’s title creates discomfort?  The house was not full.  Do nice people imagine this is some kind of porn show?  It isn’t and those who decided against it have missed something quite wonderful.

Mammalian Diving Reflex is an experimental kind of outfit.  They come up with concepts like this and try them out to see what happens and what can be discovered.  What happens with this show is that via open, frank honesty an atmosphere of inclusion is created and the audience, recognising themselves, relaxes with some relief.  What is discovered are the sexual mores of the ‘older generation’.  Sex was certainly not invented in the 1960s. 

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Lucia Eggenhoffer

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