“A full of life, chaotic one-woman show about the pleasures and challenges of life.”
Bex Wall appears on the stage (or should I say dancefloor?) dressed in her psychedelic bodysuit, wearing blue heart-shaped glasses, standing on top of a black box. All around her, stroboscopic lights, and musical tracks composed by Orbital, the electronic duo, set the scene for a show rightly named Life Would be Pretty Dull Without Sex, Raves and MDMA. Playing at the Bread and Roses Theatre for Lambeth Fringe, this award-winning show attracted a full house, understandably so.
This is an immersive show where the audience is taken into her story entirely. Bex brings you in from the very first second, already inviting a member of the audience up on stage, and soon after another one. This sets a chaotic funny tone for the rest of the evening, and this audience certainly did not shy away from the game. Throughout the show, audience members chime in, shout out some answers to Bex’s rhetorical questions, and finally at the very end, all join her on stage for a final rave.
This play raises the questions “what is life, and how should we live it?”. Co-written by Sarah Asante Gregory and Bex Wall, we are prompted to reflect on the path our lives are taking, how to live life fully and take more risks. But when the deviation off the default path starts to look more like evasion rather than intentional living, Bex confronts us with the other side of the matter: evading reality, responsibilities and pain is also not the right way to live. The message could be how to find the right balance between hedonism and strict discipline, but this isn’t fully clear.
Bex mentions “Embrace the chaos” at the start, and this is certainly needed in this fast-paced one-woman show. However, the chaos and fast pace makes the play difficult to follow at times. If our mind gets distracted for a brief second, we are immediately lost in which part of the story Bex is recounting. Because this story involves many characters, timelines and locations, it is easy to get confused if one does not pay close attention. The one thread that is easy to hold onto is the repeating pattern of sad reality – crazy partying…
Bex’s acting is hilarious at times, very moving at others. Not afraid of really showing her body in her bodysuit, and enacting every possible embarrassing moment she lived through, she gives her all in this performance, twisting and contorting her body to play out a scene in her life, or jumping on top of the black box to dance to a rave.
Kristal Lowe’s vision for this play as director is well realised. Playing with lights and shadows, she creates the necessary atmosphere for the audience to plunge into every scene, whether it be in Ibiza, Bex talking to her brother, or in a sexy rave.
This play matters very much in a world currently divided between those who simply climb up the conventional ladders of success, and those who mindlessly escape the complexities of life.
Life Would be Pretty Dull Without Sex, Raves and MDMA has now concluded its run at The Bread and Roses Theatre.