Sexytime!

Sex, eh? It's everywhere! Glowering muscularly on advertising boards or gyrating hairlessly on television screens. It's about commanding, virile men, and submissive women. What's left to say? Well, this strange little show ("about the sex, the times, the sexytimes and, of course, the times of sex") takes the images of sex we've grown accustomed to and humps them anarchically out of the window.

The nuts and bolts are simple to tell: two characters, one named "women" and the other, "man", lead us through a series of scenes, dances and mimes, at no point circling around the forbidden fruit so much as devouring it, pips and all. Woman is absolutely the leader of the gang; man simply grunts, sweats, gropes and gawps – with the odd foray into man-handling (or woman-handling) audience members. But to make man little more than a neanderthal stooge would be to rip the heart out of a production which takes love, warts and all, and ravishes it: part of what makes Sexytime! so touching is the fact that its two performers are very obviously besotted with each other.

Yes, at times one senses the shambolicness is by default rather than design, and there's a tendency to finish scenes when the song ends rather than when comic timing dictates but, hey, love is all you need, right? That and a tremendous amount of fun with a cardboard crucifix and a shield made from breasts. This is grimy, sweaty, manic Fringe raunchiness – and it's about as far from porn as you could care to fantasise.