escenic (original) (raw)

Carl Djerassi describes himself as “a biographer turned playwright.” Better to say "scientist turned biographer turned playwright," since the 90 year-old remains best known for research that led to the development of the Pill in the late Fifties. It would take some play to change that, so let’s just say that Foreplay won’t damage his reputation.

The play hinges on one of academia’s greatest puzzles: namely, the lost contents of the briefcase carried across the Pyrenees by the critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin as he fled Nazi-occupied Paris. Foreplay imagines a PHD student to have cracked it – and allows Djerassi to lay out his own theory in dramatic form.

The student, who goes by the cryptic moniker Felicitas, gathers together Benjamin’s most eminent disciples, philosophers Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, aiming to blackmail them. Turns out Benjamin had been having an “affair of the mind” with Adorno’s wife Gretel, exchanging dirty letters in lieu of actual consummation. What’s more, he was quite the kink and, so Djerassi supposes, kept his stash of porn on his person at all costs.

It’s a fascinating theory, expounded carefully, but at pace. Djerassi’s case relies on mounting speculations – for example, a tiny tonal shift in Gretel’s letters when the formal pronoun ‘sie’ (you) becomes the intimate ‘du’ – but it’s persuasive and he makes a dry academic curiosity surprisingly bracing. Foreplay also muses on intimacy and envy, contrasting Adorno’s marital jealousy with the professional rivalry between him and Arendt, and his frequent carnal infidelities with Gretel’s cerebral one. There’s a cracking line distinguishing kink from perversity too: one uses a feather, the other, the whole chicken.

But Foreplay’s basically a country house mystery with a highbrow slant and a dusting of salacious gossip. It’s a whodunit-with-whom-and-how. The Mousetrap-atus Logico-Philosophicus, if you will. And my goodness, it’s awful schlocky. The set-up is so convoluted that these great thinkers are forever reminding each other of things they already know. Elsewhere, they trot through endless alternative theories, just so Djerassi can unveil his own with a magician’s flourish. The self-satisfaction is maddening.

Andy Jordan and Jake Murray’s production indulges an already indulgent script. Simon Slater’s piano score is thick with intrigue and the acting, often just as hammy. Judi Scott mugs Arendt’s smugness, while Andrew P Stephen plays Adorno with a very obvious, very foolish pillow beneath his suit. Only Mark Oosterveen emerges with real credit, finding a spindly precision to Benjamin that captures both his sexuality and his intellect.

April 30-May 31, King’s Head Theatre, Tickets 0207 478 0160