Some plays can kind of take you by surprise…they come up with something different from what you had envisaged…This isn’t the case with British playwright Mark Ravenhill’s 1996 play SHOPPING AND FUCKING. What you expect is what you get.

TOUGH… uncompromising theatre…the darkest side of life under the spotlight.

If you are a bit squeamish….coarse language and rough sex-play turn you off….don’t even think about seeing this show. You will leave at interval if you last that long. You want entertainment…escapism…You won’t find it here.

This is a kind of punk play, the kind of play i could imagine Johnny Rotten writing if  he wrote plays.  Ravenhill’s play depicted the world of the under-class in London, where many young people felt  they had no future…where they lived moment by moment,…everything was about survival…zero romance…zero imagination…zero spirituality.

Living was about survival… about making enough money to get to next week…any way you can…prostitution…phone sex…drugs….As the play’s drug lord character says,-‘Civilisation is money’.  Consumerism ruled in all contexts.

As the program notes about this production advises,- ‘Andy Harrison’s soundscape- made from recordings of planet movements from the Voyager craft as it flies towards the edge of our solar system- is an attempt to reflect the sense of anchor-less existence’.

Alan Chambers’s production is spot on. The actors- Joseph Appleton, Giles Gartrett-Mills, David Ryan Kinsman, Steve McCall, Katherine Moss-are right on target.

A playwright telling things as he sees it. A bullseye.

A joint NIDA Independent and Sly Rat Theatre Company production, Mark Ravenhill’s SHOPPING AND FUCKING opened at  the Studio Theatre, NIDA, on  Tuesday 25 June and runs until Saturday 6 July, 2013.