We sat down with writer, Ivo de Jager, whose new show Sweetmeat comes to the Old Red Lion from 5-23 November.
What inspired you to explore dark themes like sadistic desires, online echo chambers, and gay loneliness in Sweetmeat, and how do they connect to your personal experiences?
I was a teenager in the mid-to-late 00s, which was the heyday of shock/extreme web content and a time when constant casual homophobia was still common, and I’d try to “deaden” my emotional reactions to those things by exposing myself to them constantly. Although Sweetmeat isn’t about that, my background absolutely affected the cynical attitude the characters have towards pro-LGBTQ+ corporate endeavours and the current saccharine queer media push. There’s a strong tradition of queer art being subversive and unafraid to confront its own community, while touching on raw, relevant issues within it, and I wanted to contribute to that.
Post/mid-COVID, we’re seeing a strong resurgence of reactionary anti-LGBTQ+ feelings and a loss of physical queer spaces, both of which reinforce the otherness of being LGBTQ+. There’s a tendency to want to escape that through online affirmation, which isn’t bad in and of itself, but which can feed into unhealthy habits. This is what happens to Sweetmeat’s Sigmund, who manages to find someone in real life who brings his virtual sadism offline, with dire consequences.
Your fascination with the Armin Meiwes case clearly influenced Sweetmeat. What were the challenges of adapting such a shocking real-life story for the stage?
It’s not a one-to-one adaptation, but I cribbed Meiwes’s isolation and corresponding cannibalistic fantasies for Sigmund, and the traumatic death of Brandes’s (Meiwes’s willing victim) mother and his upbringing by a homophobic father for Christian. I wanted to understand the extremes of Meiwes’s loneliness and Brandes’s self-loathing. They’re feelings everyone recognises, and LGBTQ+ people experience them keenly. The crime of consensual murder is horrific, but there’s intimacy there, too.
The main challenge was avoiding making it gratuitous. I wanted to portray Sigmund and Christian’s sadomasochistic sexualities and desires frankly, but without being exploitative. The violence in the show is contained to a handful of potent scenes, which director Conor and actors Matt and Jamie are working to make vulnerable and tasteful. It’s ultimately a tragic love story between very complicated people, so audiences expecting a grindhouse gorefest will walk away disappointed.
The play touches on mental health, rejection, and validation within the queer community. What impact do you hope Sweetmeat has on LGBTQ+ audiences and conversations around these themes?
On one hand, I hope people will feel seen in the themes addressed by the show, because I’ve personally always found comfort in my insecurities and fears being recognised. At the same time, I want to do my part (along with the rest of the SweetTeam) in keeping queer art a little freaky. There’s a veneer of acceptance in LGBTQ+ conversations, which encourages limited openness about our mental health struggles, but it’s frowned upon to really go into deep-seated issues caused by the trauma of growing up queer, or to talk about intrusive, unhealthy fantasies/fetishes – unless you’re in a space that sexualises and encourages those thoughts in the short term. There’s nothing wrong with seeking out those spaces if that’s what you’re after, but I think it’s important to stay grounded and not to relegate uncomfortable topics to the fringes, where acting on them can have real, harmful consequences.
Essentially, I think there’s a combination of corporatised LGBTQ+ discourse and forced positivity that marginalises a lot of people, and I hope the show can add a different perspective.
You’ve blended verbatim theatre with folklore in Sweetmeat. How did you balance these styles, and what effect do you hope this mix creates?
The verbatim element is featured a few times throughout the play, with comments and titles ripped from forums catering to gorehounds (fans of footage of real life graphic violence). The folklore is present in the form of English, Irish, and Swedish mythology, highlighting the othering of “strange” and unwell children and women through the invention of changelings and female spirits who ruin Good, Straight Men’s lives.
The folklore aspect came up organically while I was writing the play, as a consequence of the gorehound research. in both cases, people try to cope with their circumstances by scapegoating vulnerable members of society. In less scientifically developed and more economically troubled times and places, non-conforming members of society are explained away as literally non-human, so that cruelty against them is curative or deserved. In an alienated capitalist context, some seek out “reality” through the suffering of others, often through a lens of sexualisation, mockery, or relief, like, “at least this couldn’t happen to me.” The victims in gore and shock content are sacrificed for the reassurance of the viewers, with the detachment of the internet and a screen, in the same way outsiders were/are persecuted for the comfort of the community, with the detachment of dehumanisation and magic.
These parallels aren’t drawn explicitly in Sweetmeat, but I hope it’s the sort of thing that clicks subconsciously.
Having staged Sweetmeat since 2017, how has the play evolved? Have shifts in internet culture or how we discuss dark fantasies influenced your approach?
Although the main beats and general outline of the play have remained consistent, the content and perspective have changed. The relationship between Sigmund and Christian was never depicted as healthy, but I think the exploration of the characters has benefited from my increased writing and life experience. Sweetmeat started as anxieties and interests dashed out in script form, and has matured into a show with reasoned analysis and engaging theatrical practice.
I believe the play is more relevant now than it was in the past. The internet is more rigidly controlled and commercial, political discourse is more fragmented and frightening for queer people, and the rules around what can and can’t be discussed have become more restrictive. You only need to look at how words like murder/suicide, rape, or paedophile have morphed into unalive, grape, and .PDF file in online spaces out of a desire to please nebulous TikTok/YouTube/Instagram algorithms or censors.
From a queer standpoint, I think my curmudgeonly attitude is summed up well in the essay What’s a Good Gay Film? by B. Ruby Rich, which fears that LGBTQ+ art has suffered from “mediocrity [coming] home to roost now that the barricades have come down,” with stories diluted to please corporate overlords. Like Rich, I acknowledge the importance of straightforward feel-good stories for our community, and I know my perspective is a bit “old man yells at cloud,” but from polling the extensive sample size of My Friends, I know scornful gay weirdos also want to be represented in art.
All in all, we’re not going to change these social trends with one theatrical production, but I hope we can serve up something fresh and exciting for people who find the current standard suffocating.