Rather than go into actual anatomical detail, therapist Desmond ("not professionally trained obviously, but I've taught myself") and sidekick Raymond present a woefully uninstructive history of sex, starting with Oedipus and finishing with a ludicrous vision of the future.
Choice moments include Rasputin rushing up and down the Fortune Theatre's aisles distributing a handful of chocolates to the handful of audience members who have just helped with an on-stage recreation of the Russian Revolution, a lady patient on Dr Freud's couch having terrible trouble with the seatbelt, and Lady Chatterley's lover showing off his penguins.
A two-hander, The Wonder of Sex is by Patrick Barlow, author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, which delighted Dunedin people last year.
Lisa Warrington's direction makes the most of the script's comic possibilities: the inept, historically clueless little sketches that provide no information whatever, the pointless audience surveys that Raymond busies himself with, the animosity between the two characters that threatens to stop the show, and the pair's technological hopelessness (paradoxically enabled by the excellence of Stephen Kilroy's lighting and Rebecca De Prospo's sound) and inability to focus on the subject in question.
Unrelentingly funny though the script is, the real impact depends on the inspired characters and the actors who play them.
Phil Grieve is assured as Desmond, who has the suavity and oily charm of a game-show host, except when Raymond tries his patience too far.
Raymond seems all incompetence and stage fright, but now and then he relaxes into one of the ridiculous parts Desmond requires him to play.
Keith Adams plays him deliciously, and with more than a hint of Mr Bean.
If you go, you're unlikely to learn much about sex or anything else.
But, like Friday night's audience, you'll be mightily entertained.
The Wonder of Sex
Fortune Theatre
Friday, February 18
- Barbara Frame
