The Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents

Swiss playwright Lukas Barfuss’s provocative drama about a teenager with learning difficulties discovering her sexuality isn’t a comfortable play to watch.

The intimate setting of the Gate only heightens its unsettling qualities, yet it’s impossible to look away from Carrie Cracknell’s impressive production.

Barfuss’s play explores what happens when teenage Dora’s parents decide to take her off the drugs that have kept her docile for years and unwittingly trigger their daughter’s sexual awakening. In Cracknell’s staging, the drama comes across intriguingly as a mix of urban fable, case history and scientific experiment. Add designer Phil Brunner’s neutral grey box of a set, which has six glass cases on the walls containing doll-house-like representations of the play’s various settings, and you have an element of art installation, too.

Cath Whitefield’s vulnerable, resilient Dora is a participant in each of the play’s 35 short scenes. When not directly involved, the other cast members, who play her parents, doctor, lover and confidante, remain on the margins of the stage as observers. Individual scenes end when one of these figures presses a black or red buzzer on the wall, as if the emotional intensity of the scenario being played out had reached such a pitch that it demanded relief.

This pattern of tension and release is also played out in Ben Duke’s choreography. In the transitions between scenes the actors wheel and glide together for a moment, shifting the black blocks that constitute the stage furniture. Then the next scene begins and the pressure builds again. Barfuss may not make his play easy to watch, but he does force us to scrutinise our attitudes to sex and disability, self-realisation and repression, freedom and control.