Can you introduce yourself and your involvement in the show?
I’m Siofra Dromgoole, and I wrote After Sex, a play that follows the beginning of a couple’s relationship, largely through post-coital scenes.
Why do you think this piece is so relevant for its audience?
It takes private moments that many have in common, and puts them in a public context. It’s also thinking about what it does to a relationship between a man and a woman when they’re at the “right” age to have a baby, and how this shapes their interactions, which is a complex and relatable moment. As the play has made its way into the world, quite a few people have written to tell me how it speaks to their lives and experiences, which has meant a huge amount.
What do you think of the dating scene in the UK?
There are lots of brilliant things about the dating scene in the UK — but it also seems to me that at a certain age, dating seems to almost become work. Both because of the time people put in on apps to train their algorithm etc — but also because of how everyone reaches a place where they know what the exact shape of the date will be, with both following a rubric (set amount of drinks, beginning with safe conversation topics that verge on anodyne etc.) I thought Miriam Battye’s Strategic Love Play subverted all those tropes in a fascinating way.
What do you think the show says about connection?
Connection is at the heart of this show: how connecting to others ushers in possibility. And happiness, and health, and seeing and being seen. There are lots of moments in the play where the characters are inscrutable to each-other: even when they’re saying exactly what they mean, they don’t understand each-other. But they keep trying, and eventually they learn to listen and start to hear each-other.
I think it’s also interesting in terms of connecting up parts of yourself. It’s a play with a lot of opposites eg the characters are as playful as they are serious and as hopeful as they are cynical, and the writing style moves between prose and poetry. These things can seem contradictory; but the show is interested in how they can be connected up, and how the seeming opposites can co-exist.
Are the characters not named? Why did you make this decision?
Neither character is named, which is because I wanted the casting to be as open as possible, and for the director and actors to bring new things to to them – which they have, in ways that went beyond all my hopes. Many of the interpretations that Azan Ahmed (“Him”) Antonia Salib (“Her”) and Izzy Parriss the director have made are things I also saw in the parts — but they’ve also discovered many things about them that I didn’t know were there, which is a great, great joy.
What was the original inspiration for the show?
It’s interested in all the things I’m most interested in — intimacy, sex, sexuality, love and desire. When I wrote it, I was thinking a lot about how out-of-step all our narratives around “The One” are, when most people’s love lives are made up of a lot of short-term relationships. Sometimes these don’t mean much, but sometimes they mean everything — and I feel like too often they’re dismissed. Someone told me that she thought this show “elevated the situationship” and I loved that – I wanted to find a new language for dating, that didn’t dismiss those relationships.
Read our four star review here!
‘A dramatic rom-com set in the afterglow of casual sex that touches you in all the right places‘