I Promise You Sex and Violence

David Ireland’s plays tend to ride roughshod over the standards of polite society. Political correctness is his bête noire and he can’t stand softly-softly, happy-clappy liberal hypocrisy. Here, he goes gunning for our tiptoeing tolerance of race, gender and sexuality, but ties himself in knots along the way.

Ireland shows us a triangle of friends. Bunny (Keith Flemming) is bisexual, but nobody knows. His flatmate Charlie thinks he’s gay. Best mate Raymond thinks him straight. He self-defines differently with each: touchy-feely with Charlie, building-site blokey with Raymond. Bunny’s white. He’s male. He gets to do that; to keep control of his labels.

Meanwhile, Charlie identifies as a feminist, but her fondness for a good shag means she’s often dubbed a slut. Likewise Raymond, who sees himself as white according to his upbringing, but, being mixed race, is more usually deemed black.

But all this gets confused by a scattergun plot. Bunny sets his two friends up and their blundering blind date leads—inexplicably—to an equally blundering bondage and role-play session. Bunny, always pulling the strings, attempts to railroad proceedings into a three-way.

Is all this about white patriarchy? Or is it about the possibility of co-existing contradictions – slutty feminists, consensual rape and the like? Really, who can tell? Ireland’s determination to be daring—chucking dildos and faecal fetishes around willy-nilly—capsizes the play into juvenilia, and each of his characters behaves so irrationally, you want to escort them offstage and into care. Something of a shambles, to be honest.