Roy Williams's fascinating play about the cut and thrust of sexual politics, as played by young, black and white working-class Londoners, begins with conventional male swaggering. Marc Warren's Ben, white and married, tries to persuade his best friend, Rhashan Stone's Kenny, black and single, to sweep one of the easy girls off her dancing feet in the Palais nightclub. But somehow nothing comes of the idea. For into their midst lumbers Deobia Oparei's Ade, the muscleman with a six-pack, who loves films with subtitles, went to school with Kenny and is sure no self-respecting girl will resist him.
Clubland is not about anything as simple as scoring for one night - or more. Williams deals with the games people play when caught up in pursuit of love and how truth is often the first casualty when sex rears an insistent head. Indu Rubasingham's astute production is played upon a bare stage, with a door to a flat and a night-club lavatory. Odd pieces of furniture, ponderously hauled on stage for scenes beyond the nightclub's walls, serve no vital purpose. The talking, not the locations, matters.
In 12 deft scenes and 80 minutes, rich in their astute, comic observing of male pride and performance, Williams shows how the erotic dilemmas of five characters compare, contrast and connect. Sandra, Ade's black girlfriend, whom Natasha Gordon dynamically plays with spit-fire belligerence and contempt, abandons her man because he cannot resist nights with white girls and refuses to admit his derelictions. When she's caught up with Kenny, the decent, 29-year-old assistant bank manager who shows small interest in girls, she's regretfully reminded of her preference for the unreliable Ade, despite his wish to have her in handcuffs before sex and during it.
Cavan Clerkin's Nathan, who says he never liked being a lad and rejoices in new fatherhood, offers a sole example of emotional content. The play's apparent, aspiring lads - black Kenny, with his vague but constant air of unease, and the white, wife-loathing Ben, obsessively trying to arrange sex for his friend - emerge as the play's true self-deceivers. It's surely an unspoken, unrecognised love for each other that drives them to bluster in dance halls. Warren and Stone play these two, sad posers, who cannot acknowledge their own feelings, with riveting, repressed emotion.
Clubland
