"Manwatching". Pilch. Review by Sam Wagman

 “Art consists of reshaping life but it does not create life, nor cause life.”

So said Stanley Kubrick, in an interview with Sight & Sound, whilst promoting A Clockwork Orange. His directorial touch was always inspired, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Barry Lyndon, by a negotiation with the gap between performance and reality. Whether facing the vast night of space in 2001 or the orgiastic excess at the centre of Eyes Wide Shut, we are forced to ponder the performativity of our fear, our desire, and our sense of self. It is the performance of life within the boundaries of art that acts as a mirror, dangling us closer and closer to the edge of self-realisation. 

Matchbox Productions’ staging of Manwatching is littered with references to Kubrick’s body of work. Penned by an anonymous British comedienne, Manwatching chronicles its writer’s journey of sexual realisation and interactions with the opposite sex in straight monologue. The choice to include Kubrick’s filmography (in references to the sadism of Eyes Wide Shut or the iconic comradery of Kirk Douglas’ ‘I am Spartacus!’) only serves to enhance this journey – a bite back at a film canon that so consistently emphasises a male gaze of sexuality and craving. For, at the heart of Manwatching, is a process of narrative reclamation; reading out this monologue (upon seeing the script for the first time on stage) are three men. 

Breadsticks and pitted olives adorn the tables of a Michael Pilch Studio more reminiscent of an American presidential campaign hustings than a theatre. Three stools adorn the stage, surrounded by Pilch chairs and tables with no set dressing and no theatrical pizzazz. The choice of snacks were not lost on this reviewer; the clashing of gender and gendered sexuality on show from the get-go. From the moment our three men received their scripts (each night of Manwatching’s run involves three different actors), the awkward hilarity of the production’s conceit were on full display. 

“Va” “-gi” “-na”

They pronounced the word with the ginger mannerisms of a Religious Studies teacher delivering sex-ed. The immediate improvisation and textual discovery that underpins Matchbox’s production goaded its actors, as much as they may have resisted, into moments of male discomfort with femininity. It’s a genius conceptual stroke from our anonymous playwright, and not one that goes without mention. Manwatching is conversant with itself – cognizant of the intricacies of anonymity and the baffling decision to stage its narrative of reclamation through the mouths of its target. Towards the end she berates those who critique her decision to remain nameless. She argues that her decision is precipitous from the spotlight, scrutiny, and violence that is so often directed at women who publicly embrace their sexuality. The men on stage, in this regard, become both cannon fodder and an ironic shield; to put on a play about women’s sex lives without the fear of reprisal, one must have a man read it. It’s a decision that pays off, every single time. 

Our author guides us through each stage of her sexual awakening, from her first encounter with masturbation, to her (oft) wildly absurd erotic fantasies with every mention of girth, length, nipples, and ejaculation tinged by the juxtaposition of the demonstrably male voices that air them. There’s corpsing aplenty from my performance’s trio (Lucas Ipkendanz, Dylan Ng, and Cosimo Asvisio) – an interlude involving a particularly vivid description of being ‘milked’ by several older men whilst lying on a table elicited somewhat maniacal laughter from both audience and performer. Manwatching, for large swathes of its brief 40-minute run-time, is primarily a fun night out. Three men elucidating their thoughts on the nerve endings of the vagina, the boredom of giving a handjob, or the nature of a female orgasm is always going to be a riot. 

The beauty of its script, however, lies in the sharp abuttal’s of the narrator’s latent anger at Western patriarchal culture. Just as I was in fits of laughter at Ipkendanz’s delivery of a biology lesson, the next line came along, depicting the stark reality of sexual assault, male gaslighting, or the loneliness the author encountered following an abortion. These insertions of pathos in the midst of droll self-deprecation mirrored the dislocation of its performer’s approach. The improvised, and thus disjointed, line delivery acted as a palimpsest to the text itself – every hesitation, intonational misstep, and stifled laugh underlining the distance between performance and reality, between performer and text. This is not pompous experimental theatre, but rather a conceptual framework with something to say. Matchbox Productions has (seemingly for the millionth time) marked itself out as a company willing to bring risk to Oxford theatre and hold enough trust in their audience that they’ll be receptive. The minimal set design combined with the image of three actors intermittently swigging beer on stage projected the production’s implicit assurance in its own vitality. 

At the end of Manwatching, its anonymous author speaks directly to her audience. She offers a reasoning behind her decision to stage the play with three men as her voice. She lampoons and harangues them for being just handsome enough and questions our disposition to sexualise them in spite of her renunciation of the male gaze; ultimately, in the context of her prose, these are “men whose remit was to read this to a tee.” Our actors, on whichever night in whichever theatre, are secondary figures. They are responsible for the reshaping of art, not its creation nor causation. The act of reclamation lies in the visual and conceptual theatrical distance between performer and author. Coloured by its delivery, sure, but foundationally attached to its original narrator, her story, in her words.