In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play)

This play is possibly the most hilariously awkward and excruciatingly funny experience you’ll have in the theatre.

Why awkward? Three words: On Stage Orgasms. Dozens of them, I kid you not, each more intimate than the last. No intimate detail is shirked. Each big O is followed by—oh, my labyrinthitis-afflicted aunt—a ritual washing of the hands.

Don’t worry, all the action was hidden under sheets, as tastefully as possible under the circumstances. Set in the late 1800s, it’s based on the true story of doctors treating hysteria (the late Victorian female mental health diagnosis de jour) with early electric vibrators.

The humour derives from an empathic embarrassment on behalf of the characters. That 1880s society has such strict definitions of sexuality that the women and man involved don’t even have the conceptual framework to make sense what’s happening to them as the vibrator is pressed to their nethers. Not even the doctor twigs that his “therapy” is in any way sexual. The audience of course knows, and the audience knows that if the characters knew they would be mortified.

NUTS have brought off a good amateur production which was enthusiastic and amusing. Some lines you knew were funny were falling flat and that was a timing issue. But they conveyed the layers of complexity surrounding the constricted 1880s social construct of female sexuality. Oliver Baudert as the lucky Doctor Givings was disconcertingly like John Pertwee’s Doctor Who, putting his sonic screwdriver where it’s never been before. Dylan van den Berg was very strong, as always, and had the best comic timing. Molly Jones, however, shone though as Mrs Daldry, a confused woman with attractions towards women she couldn’t begin to address. The near period costumes designed by Ava Jorge were fabulous.

The show climaxed with a moment of genuine, moving tenderness. Certainly not a show for the faint-hearted, this was an interesting and thoughtful production I could heartily recommend.

Cathy Bannister