Sex Lives of Others

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There’s an undertone of class warfare to Sex Lives of Others, a sexual but decidedly unsexy piece of new writing. Keely Winstone’s script, directed by Fringe veteran Hannah Eidinow, invites us to peer through the curtains into the bedrooms of the nation. In one, the middle-aged and middle-class: the gratingly pretentious Hilary (Joanna Bending) shoots barbs at her gormless husband James (Martin Miller), bickering and fretting over absent children. Next door, sharp-tongued but emotionally fragile Kerry (Jessica Baglow) sulks at her wisecracking git of a boyfriend Sonny (Matt Green), as the twentysomething lovers nurse hangovers and squabble over exes.

But both couples unite in their prurient fascination with the other; a vicarious obsession serving as distraction from their own sexual hangups. It’s an unexpectedly compelling conceit: the couples’ glass-to-the-wall voyeurism listening for each grunt, moan and recrimination next door a neat parallel to the audience’s spying on both. But we don’t really know any of the characters—and thus, don’t really care about them—because Sex Lives of Others gives them no greater context than sex and small-talk.

There’s no narrative meat on the script’s bones but then, there isn’t meant to be, because Sex Lives of Others is all about mundanity. It’s a blackly comic and thoroughly awkward de-glamourisation of sex in the age of Fifty Shades... replete with generally well-paced banter and unrepentantly lame wordplay. But it ends much like many of the sexual encounters it chronicles: abruptly, and without a particularly satisfactory conclusion, leaving us to wonder why we came.