Gone

When Alex Riley wakes on the morning of his 40^th birthday he is in for rude shock. His penis has gone, vanished, disappeared. Alex, an erotic gay fiction writer, has quite the reputation about town, with an online profile to match. News of Alex’s misfortune travels the social media networks and leaving him to ponder his own identity, and loss of currency in the sexual marketplace.

Daniel Fischer, Walter Hanna and Michael Treloar smoothly traverse the play’s eight characters under crisp clean lighting, and within a minimal set. As one might expect, phallic turns of phrase, colloquial colour and sexual overtone are a constant companion.

In spite of its ‘Queer Theatre’ label,Gone touches on universal issues: changing body image, ageing, identity, privacy, relationships and our public persona. There are laughs in this well-paced hour-long play, and some watchable physical humour. Memorable too was some effective use of fabric (think Edvard Munch’s The Scream), although later moments of pathos never quite hit the mark.

The inaugural winner of the Playtime New Theatre Initiative in 2015, this cheeky comedy is only a five-show season, and then it will be, well….gone!

Lucy Graham