A muddle of a play that abandons its timely AI revenge-porn premise for incoherent plotting and erratic characters — redeemed a little by fleeting flashes of sharp, comic writing.Rating
OK
On entering the Canal Café Theatre auditorium, I found its seats a jumble, set around higgledy-piggledy cabaret tables in a loose kind of thrust arrangement. It all felt odd and clumsy. This proved apt because Swans Are F****** Arseholes is, unfortunately, an odd and clumsy piece of work. Little of the story makes sense, and not one of the characters makes a remotely relatable decision over the hour-long run time. The action unfurls at the whim of star, and writer Emma Zadow, and I couldn’t make head nor tail of her intentions. And dear reader, I tried. I’m still trying as I write this. What, if I can borrow from the show’s title, does it all f******* mean?
The marketing promises an investigation of AI revenge porn. How topical. Urgent, even. Sadly, this is jettisoned early in favour of a different story. The protagonist, Sarah (Zadow), has a secret past as a “drug tester” (I presume this means addict, too, but I couldn’t swear to it). She has an alternative identity from the past, Sapphire, that she wants to keep from her kind but dull boyfriend, Mark (Benjamin Sumrie). It’s not clear why. She’s in recovery, not an ex-CIA assassin. Are drug testers with secret names even a thing? None of this rings true. The police, we find out early on, somehow know all about Sarah’s scandalous past. They know she is Sapphire. This plot point is never explained or explored, though, because the police drop the revenge porn case and disappear from the story well before the end. Their scenes, emphatically played, are narratively pointless.
We also apparently don’t get to know why Sarah/Sapphire’s former dealer and lover, Tas (a game Mary Tillet), turns up looking Pat Butcher-like to throw cinnamon pastries across the stage. We visit a Soho cocktail club briefly and meet two camp waiters who pop up just to hand over drinks and, what, confirm stereotypes? Mark doesn’t stay kind and dull. He lurches from caring and believing to angry and disbelieving, which Sarah/Sapphire inexplicably finds hilariously funny. And then, before we know it, our protagonist is swallowing pills in a suicide bid to an Enya soundtrack. She, spoiler alert, survives, rescued by a character called Frank, who is into composting. See: odd and clumsy.
Anyhow, Sarah/Sapphire learns something about life and has a monologue at the close of the show to tell us about it. I wish I could say this helps bring everything together, but alas, no. Instead, it opens a whole new argument. Love and grief are chemicals in the brain, we’re told. There’s maths, too. Divide it all by time, and you’ll be ok. What this has to do with the preceding 60 minutes, I couldn’t tell you.
The frustrating thing is, I’m sure everything made sense at some point, but somehow, somewhere, everyone has taken their eye off the ball. If the play is to return, Zadow, or someone she trusts, needs to take a big red pen to the script and trim it down to essentials: a coherent story and believable characters. Perhaps the place to start would be focusing on the play that the marketing promises. What happens when a young woman is targeted by an AI porn attack? We’re crying out for a good, timely play about that. Zadow might be the writer to bring it to us, too. There are snatches of comic brilliance here to celebrate. In-laws being unreasonable and a humdinger of an awkward first date scene stand out a mile. The rest needs a huge rethink.
Written by Emma Zadow
Directed by Freja Gift
Produced by BS* Productions
Swans Are F****** Arseholes has completed its run at the Canal Café Theatre
