Feature - Louise Orwin: "I'm sure if I had gone to any other artistic venue, they would have run a mile!"

Steamy conversations resound the streets of London’s theatre scene as sex is a topic that’s no longer just for the bedroom. Not only has there been multiple adaptations of La Ronde in the last year or two, but even Hampstead Theatre have gotten down and dirty with the topic with their sell-out show Sex With Strangers. Although sex has been talked about in theatre since as early as Aristophanes, it somehow remained an unconventional subject. So, does this mean we can now talk seriously about sex? Or more importantly, although we talk about it, are we exploring and promoting the right things?

Louise Orwin wasn’t completely convinced. “Sex positive movement is really great… but I found that I was just not satisfied by the messages put forward by it. I feel like it can be narrow sometimes, and so for people who are struggling with their sexuality and negative aspects of their desires, there’s not much space to talk about those things” and so, she took matters into her own hands.

Engage in this fantasy: somewhere hidden at the corner of a tall central London building is an intimate, enclosed dark room. Here, secrets are spilled, desires are decrypted, and emotions are exploited. You find yourself in a large menagerie of spectators, awaiting the carnal, all who have consented to several moments of Radiohead foreplay and Barbie doll voyeurism.

But this is not fantasy. It’s a space for fantasies. It’s Orwin’s political sex chamber.

This enclosed dark room is Camden People’s Theatre, and Orwin’s newest show Oh Yes Oh No is headlining the venue’s current festival, Hotbed. This festival of sex hosts a congress of performers and artists who challenge sex and its relationship with theatre while laying it bare, and Orwin certainly lays it bare when exploring the issue of sexual assault.

With real accounts from female rape survivors, Oh Yes Oh No explores the taboo topic of rape and controversial sexual desires. “I wanted to make a show about embracing female desire, but I found myself time and time again coming back to the ‘R’ word, to my own experience of rape, and to this niggling feeling that I wasn’t entirely in control of my own desire.” Orwin tells me that she “wants to talk about the political repercussions of our sexual actions”, apparently while munching on a bowl of cereal. It was definitely an interesting conversation over breakfast.

Audience participation is an important aspect in her previous works and it continues to be so. In this performance, she encourages the audience to consent amongst themselves and decide on a volunteer to assist her with reading from cue cards. Little do they know they’ll be assisting in Barbie and Ken doll porn soon after – not once, but twice. “I don’t like theatre where people sit in the dark and are completely passive… for me, the most effective way of bringing people into the discussion is by making them complicit in it.”

“I don’t want people to leave the theatre thinking that they can just walk away from it and leave it behind,” she tells me, “I want it to sit inside them for days and days afterwards” and it certainly has people talking. Orwin takes pride in being a feminist, however, the female-centred nature of her performance means that it’s criticised to negatively portray men as violent sexual predators, which is only a snippet of the criticism I overheard from audience members post-performance. Not being sure about this opinion myself, I asked her to comment: “That’s an argument that’s thrown at feminism all the time… unfortunately we live in a pretty terrible, broken system… a patriarchy which means that if you are a man, you have privilege, and that if you are a woman who has been assaulted, it’s likely to be by a man.” She strongly believes this criticism is systematic of living in this patriarchy. Despite carrying concrete views on feminism and sex positivity, she doesn’t like to force-feed this to her audience. Radiohead was her key to this ambiguity.

Oh Yes Oh No is embedded with Radiohead’s mellow rock ballads, and, if nothing else but my curiosity, I asked Orwin ‘why Radiohead’ and not, say, Muse or Gorillaz, for example. After a chuckle, all was clear, and the reasons behind her full-blown karaoke cover of ‘Creep’ was entirely justified: “One of the stories I was working with, which was my own story of rape, I remembered that Radiohead was playing in the background… I think it’s ambiguous in the song whether the guy is lamenting the fact that he doesn’t fit in, or if he’s rejoicing in it. Ambiguity is important in all my work. I wanted people to be left with this true question of whether I should go forward with these taboo sexual desires I have or whether I’m going to be questioning them.”

Her intentions fit profusely with CPT’s vision for Hotbed; artistic director Brian Logan comments that theatre is about “getting a bunch of people in a room together in the moment, not mediated by screens, to concentrate their attention and share their perspective on a certain thing.” But I wondered: why an entire theatre festival about sex? He continues to describe the remission theatre seems to have when talking about sex: it can be awkward and often too risky and explicit to represent on stage. Hotbed is “theatre in which artists can be challenged to be explicit and non-metaphoric about sex, pushing through that discomfort to see what interest lies on the other side.”

It’s clear why Orwin is headlining a festival at CPT for the third time. She explains “it’s kind of like my spiritual theatre home. For this show, because it’s taboo and quite difficult material, CPT is the best place for it.” Orwin has gained a reputation from her involvement with the fringe venue, with her shows Pretty Ugly and A Girl and A Gun receiving praise from critics like Lyn Gardner and Megan Vaughan.

Orwin confirms that Oh Yes Oh No is a work-in-progress. The performance explores a side of sex that’s not often penetrated, but who knows… since we’re now talking about sex more openly, what other desires await unleashing?

picture from Louise Orwin's online portfolio: http://louiseorwin.com/oh-yes-oh-no