A battle of the sexes perfectly suited to the #Metoo climate
No playwright understands the power of a viciously funny opening sex scene like Vicky Jones. Her excellent 2017 play Touch began with Dee performing a boozy striptease featuring kitchen props for a Tinder date. This bleaker, uglier piece, first seen in 2014, beats that: it opens with Jo trying to catch Wotsits in her mouth while having sex with her boyfriend on the sofa.
Jones is one of our sharpest (and filthily wittiest) poets of messy, visceral female sexuality: she originally wrote the role of Jo for Phoebe Waller-bridge and went on to direct Waller-bridge in Fleabag, which became a zeitgeist-defining, Bafta-winning TV show.
The One, revived by Steve Marmion and featuring Tuppence Middleton from War and Peace and Sense8 as Jo, doesn’t feel as fully formed as these two later plays. Yet in the way it tracks the shifting power dynamic between Jo and Harry over one grubbily violent, wine-soaked night, it taps into a desolate, 21st-century sexual confusion that feels uncannily current.
Jo and Harry are staying up for news of Jo’s sister, who is in labour. There are innumerable bottles of wine in the kitchen, Phantom of the Opera on the stereo and porn on the TV. Soon, though, they are interrupted by a brief visit from Harry’s distressed ex, Kerry, who thinks her boyfriend may have sexually assaulted her. The deliberate ambiguity of this scenario (Kerry didn’t tell him to stop; Jo provocatively makes a big show of being outraged on Kerry’s boyfriend’s behalf) sets up much of what follows as Jo and Harry pass the rest of the night indulging in dangerous role-playing games in which the borders of consent and control are nastily blurred.
When the play premiered, the character of Jo stood out for being a rare and brave example of an emotionally sour, unlikeable woman with an exhilarating penchant for upending the norms of accepted female sexual behaviour.
Four years on, in a climate in which #Metoo has taken a blowtorch to the dynamics of sexual power, Marmion’s production emphasises the extent to which Jo’s callous reflexes are a response to her controlling, physically threatening boyfriend, an academic 10 years her senior and played with brutish, manipulative charm by John Hopkins. He breaks plates, grabs her by the throat, undermines her intellect, and admits to having sex with her when he knows she doesn’t want it. In response, Middleton’s chilly, slippery Jo humiliates him in front of Kerry and stages a gender role-reversing deception of breathtaking cruelty.
Yet at the same time, Tuppence’s Jo seems as much a character of circumstance as a woman with agency (however unpleasant) in her own right. It’s also frustrating that Harry feels like the more developed character: a needy, sex-addicted career man whose issues with his neglectful mother manifest themselves in a desire to seek violent control in his relationship.
We know next to nothing about Jo – she doesn’t even appear to have a job – while the question of what she gets out of being with him (or indeed why she simply doesn’t get up and leave) is one the play frustratingly neither fully answers or even asks.
Still, Marmion’s production exerts a grim, car crash-style fascination as we watch two people locked in selfsabotaging, behavioural patterns in which the definitions of what is real, what is desired and what is abuse are in a deeply discomforting state of flux. Jones is currently away writing with Waller-bridge for a TV comedy for HBO. A shame: we need her back on the stage, fast.