★★★★★
How do you review a show where the audience takes an oath of silence? Standing with the rest of the crowd, I held my hand high and promised not to tell; not to let what was said leave the room.
Four people over 65 had entered the stage from the stalls and sat at a table, press conference-style, with a (much younger) host placed to their left. He began to read out random years starting with 1942, and over the course of time we learned each of their names and birth years. And how many people they’d shagged.
As the years rolled on, Peter, Jennie, Liz, Ronaldo, Judith and Paul would tell us the sum of their sexual experiences, from childhood curiosities to heartbreaks and marriages. As each decade passed, an era-specific song would ring out and the stage would descend into dance and sing-along, before the process continued. While it might sound methodic, we gained the full richness of each of their experiences. Rather than a sordid night of erotic tales, we were treated to their full life stories as viewed through their various dalliances and relationships. In front of the audience was a gay man who’d fathered five children by donation; another who came out in his 50s; two women who’d been married but had not had children, by choice and by situation; and another who’d had one by mistake. There were tales of joy and despair, divorce and unconditional love as these six locals told it like it was.
Occasionally their stories would pose a question to the audience and an interactive discussion would begin on everything from open relationships to how to handle partners who steal. In a crazy world of hyper-change, it’s often the truest stories that hit home the hardest.
Of all the pomp and arts of Sydney Festival, this show was just one huge party, in the truest sense of the term. There was happiness and music and streamers and even champagne, and vulnerability and support and a whole lot of truth – a big celebration of what it means to be human; our relationships with each other and our trials throughout. I left the theatre willing to keep my oath, but to replace it with the story that this was one of the best nights of theatre I’d ever seen; where the performers bared their souls onstage, and we were all the better for it.
Photo: Prudence Upton
All The Sex I’ve Ever Had was reviewed at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House on Thursday January 21 as part of Sydney Festival 2016
