Sunday, July 3, 2011

Reading Response: Shopping and Fucking

Shopping and Fucking by Mark Ravenhill

Shopping and Fucking is a play about a confused former drug addict trying to make his life meaningful and stable once again.

The play Shopping and Fucking is shocking at first glance even without reading its content. Shopping and what now? Yes, fucking. I understand why this genre of theatre is called “In-Yer-Face” because the wording, actions, and characters themselves are all up in “yer-face” and there are multiple points throughout the play that I had to comment aloud, “WTF?” The title is an important indicator of what this play is about because while it is a shocker of a name to some, it’s true meaning is more than that. Shopping and fucking are both shallow and superficial things that may have a place in every lifestyle but certainly cannot make up one entirely… or can they? A life that thrives purely on the temporary thrill of a new sale item and a one night stand is a life void of any meaning at all, and Ravenhill concocts an entire web of people merely existing in a life that may not be worth living in the first place.



There are five characters mentioned in this play and some are more important than others. They all have phony and shallow dependencies on which they live: drugs, indifferent lovers, and money, but they all have deeper goals, fantasies and ideals like any normal person does. What makes these people abnormal is that their deep and certainly dark daydreams lie in the same realm as their current nasty habits. Mark is a drug addict who, in a quest for self-improvement, goes to rehab in hopes of turning his life around and finding true love. He is promptly thrown out of rehab for engaging in a sexual tryst with another man in the restroom. Marks idea of love is different than what you or I might call love. It does not involve caring for someone or them truly looking to you for unconditional acceptance, and Mark knows this. He admits in the play that he has trouble distinguishing between love, and, well… fucking, but he solves this little problem with money. In order to assure himself that someone who he has sex with does not love him, he must pay them; if he pays them they are employees, not lovers! This brings us to Robbie, Mark’s ex-boyfriend. Robbie loves Mark but he knows that Mark does not love him back. His true quest for happiness is a quest for a better world and a world where everyone is content with their lives, including himself. How does Robbie work toward this hefty goal? Ecstasy! Robbie induces chemical happiness (and as a drug dealer gives out the rest of his E for free) and pretends that the world isn’t filled with horrible people and that he isn’t one of them.

There is Brian, the drug lord who is Robbie’s boss. Brian is not much of a character in the play but he does have a certain dependency on money, insisting that his employees recite, “Money is civilization,” over and over again. Brian has a son who plays the cello, and he shows a video of this boy’s recitals to his dealer slackies. Whilst this beautiful scene of peace and independent tranquility (something that none of the characters could ever really fathom) is playing Brian insists that it is money that created it and that paying for the lessons and the instrument brought this beauty into the world, and that it could easily take it out.

There is Lulu, Robbie’s roommate and partner in crime (literally). Lulu’s dependency was hard for me to understand at first but eventually I understood it as pseudo-independence. Lulu steals individually portioned TV dinners and refuses to share them with other people. She provides the food in the household and insists that everyone have their own TV dinner because, “There may not be enough to share…” Lulu’s attempts to find independence are foiled by her dream of becoming an actress, and then taking a job as a drug dealer with Robbie as her right hand man. Lulu also lets herself down by handling situations that happen to her individually by leaning on Robbie. When Lulu witnesses a murder in a convenience store she uses the distraction as an opportunity to steal a candy bar, later telling Robbie, “It shouldn’t be so hard to get a chocolate bar.” In the end of the play Mark, Robbie, and Lulu are all sharing a TV dinner and even worse feeding it to each other, symbolizing the breakdown of their screwed up and poorly supported efforts to find where they belong in the world.

Finally there is Gary. Gary is my favorite character because he is the most tragically damaged and transparent one. He comes into the play as a male prostitute to Mark, with Mark insisting that he pay Gary so that he can distinguish between love and mere sex. Three days later Mark’s plan is ruined with Gary no longer accepting money but instead, taking mark shopping with stolen credit cards. Gary buys Mark expensive suits and insists that Mark get whatever he wants; unfortunately what Mark wants is Gary’s love. Yep, Mark has become infatuated once again and insisted that Gary loves him. Meanwhile Gary has a lifelong goal as well, to be taken care of. And just like the other characters, Gary goes about this in a horrific and tragic way. Gary is a fourteen-year-old boy being sexually abused by his stepfather. To Gary, love is pain. Gary wants to be abused and insists that there is someone out there who really wants to protect him and keep him and he will not stop until he finds what he is looking for.

A theme running through this play is Robbie and Lulu’s second job as phone sex workers. When they are with Mark they play out a scenario of finding someone out in this big world that wants them and will do anything to have them. The story goes something like, “There is a fat man who owns you, and someone asks the fat man who you are. The fat man says, ‘Who? Him? He is trash, nothing, worthless.’ The stranger says, ‘I’ll give you 20 quid for him,’ and the fat man makes a deal. The stranger takes you home to a safe and warm place. And keeps you.” The fantasy is quite beautiful, in its own way, but it can be tweaked for each person. You can imagine how this could be horrifically ‘tweaked’ for Gary, and as quickly as he came into the story he gone.

Although this play has its shock value once you get past it you can understand the larger representation for consumerism in the UK and the upsets surrounding the Thatcher administration’s financial reputation that this story emits. In my perspective this play presents the core of shallowness in a contemporary society and the scummy-ness that is associated with it. It presents multiple lives that cannot be considered lives at all because the people living them are both unable to function at a daily level but are also unable to perform the intrinsic activity of dreaming up a future in which they are happy.

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