Looking For Fun?
Kings Head Theatre •11 - 15 October 2022
It was back to The Kings Head Theatre last night to watch Looking For Fun?, a new play written and performed by Conor Ó'Cuinn and directed by Tazy Harrison-Moore, being performed in London for a short run fresh from the Edinburgh Fringe.
Taking my seat to the sound of The Cocteau Twins, the first note I scribbled down was a reminder to myself that, ’I must play more Cocteau Twins’. It had been far too long since I had last enjoyed the hypnotic sound of Elizabeth Frazer et-al, ‘Pearly Dewdrops’ Drops’ having been a big part of the soundtrack to my college years.
To be fair, the musical cues that are periodically dropped in throughout tonights performance are all well chosen tracks that enhanced rather than detracted, but before I could get too carried away on an ethereal cloud of the Cocteau’s making, the mood was suddenly broken by the sound of that oh-so familiar tone of the Grindr ‘new-message’ notification. I should point out that it’s familiarity was not so much due to any sort of dating app addiction on my part, more that it has become a ubiquitous sound in such a lot of the contemporary queer theatre I have found myself watching, and as such I confess to bristling slightly at hearing that particular sound open the play. It seems strange, given the popularity these apps still enjoy, that there can be quite so many productions putting their more detrimental effects under the microscope. Whilst there’s no doubting the relevance of the subject, and it being very much of its time, my fear was that I just might have seen it all before? How original could this story really be.
As it turns out, there was much to like about Ó'Cuinn’s take on the subject, and after a brief interaction with Grindr, we find him making a visit to a sexual health clinic. Listed in the program only as ‘lookingforfun’, Ó'Cuinn plays his character with a vulnerability the audience can immediately warm to… but naive he most certainly is not, as he swerves a number of intimate questions asked by the nurse, (played in voice only by Fiona Forster) during his medical assessment for PrEP. In reality. ‘lookingforfun’ is free-falling into the realms of gay hookup culture, sometimes for money, sometimes for fun, sometimes with couples, sometimes with older men, but mostly without considering the consequences it is having, not only on his sexual health but also on his mental health. From payed, to played, and even a bit of good old fashioned dating on the side, Ó'Cuinn skilfully takes us on a whistle-stop journey through the lot… and it’s not always pretty.
Given the journey he goes on, it’s almost inevitable that by the end of the play our guide is casting a more critical eye on the hook-up culture he finds himself in, and how Apps like Grindr only allow gay men to escape their loneliness ‘one night at a time’. With the play being subtitled ’A queer manifesto against Grindr’, it’s unsurprising that Ó'Cuinn allows his character to question the merits of looking for ‘fun’ through dating apps, and in a play that is at times as harrowing as it is witty, the point is definitely well made… the point being that, just maybe, we are looking for fun in all the wrong places.
Despite this being a one man play, Conor Ó'Cuinn takes full ownership of the all-but-empty stage. In productions with so little in terms of a physical setting, even the smallest stages can easily become a vast empty space in which the cast can sometimes look lost, but Ó'Cuinn has an enigmatic presence that comfortably fills the space as he peppers his story with characters that he is faultlessly able to dance between, as shown in a highly amusing haircut scene. “This wasn’t my first haircut… but he might be my first barber” he excitedly confides to the audience. Despite this lack of a physical set, the play is serviced well by Freya Games’ more than competent lighting design, to which the glow of Ó'Cuinn’s iPhone actually manages to enhance, and is impressively used to good effect at various points throughout the play. The momentum does occasionally stall during some of the less dialogue-driven scenes, and I question whether better directed movement, or even the introduction of some more expressionistic choreography could have helped lift these by being a more physical portrayal of his internal thoughts and feelings.
That being said, Looking For Fun is Conor Ó'Cuinn’s playwriting debut, and it’s a good indication of his potential as a gifted story-teller in the making. That he is also very engaging as an actor makes him a double-threat we’ll definitely be keeping an eye on.
★★★★
review: Simon J. Webb