Theatre - David Jays on a post-gay play where everything's up for sale
In 1726, William Brown was arrested in the cruising grounds of Moorfields for fumbling a police agent provocateur, and protested: "I think there is no crime in making what use I please of my own body." The uses people make of their bodies, and on what terms, animate Mother Clap's Molly House, a glinting new play by Mark Ravenhill.
Wonderfully played by Deborah Findlay in a ruminative dither, the newly widowed Mrs Tull dislikes hiring out dresses to whores - but who else needs fancy dress? Meanwhile, her wandering apprentice ("His head's filled with trade, int that right, Martin?") falls in with the mollies, the label of choice for 18th-century gay men. Tull's husband maintained that the world was only thieves and customers, the family a tight defensive unit. As she struggles with the art of slut-haggle, Tull discovers that mollies can be both substitute brood and extravagant clients, and opens a molly house for banter, dancing and shuffling sex.
Ravenhill's pastiche, like the mollies' own cant, is a jostling blend of arch-femininity and criminal slang. Mollies inhabit a post-Renaissance shift from acts to identity: a bugger is only a bugger when he is on the job, but a molly seems a full-time calling. Ravenhill, calling himself "post-gay", dismisses most recent gay drama as "Calvin theatre". There's a fair quantity of gusset and pec on view here, and gay plays of a previous generation might have ended with his first-act mollies' chorus proclaiming: "Shit on those who call this sodomy - we call it fabulous!" But Ravenhill pushes beyond the loud and proud in his second act.
Peter Ackroyd, sniffing out correspondences in London's history, might enjoy the action flashing forward to hot modern Holborn, where Will and Josh host a sex party. Giles Cadle's skewed dark-wood set suggests both Hogarthian cramp and contemporary masculine chic. As Mrs Tull becomes Mother Clap, and her mollies codify their pleasures, the modern equivalents are armoured in horny indifference. Ravenhill skewered the alliance of sex and spending in his debut, Shopping and Fucking (1996); here, fantasy smooths the path of the pink pound - less liberation than niche marketing.
Beyond Ravenhill's bravura provocation, some detect an old-fashioned sensibility, holding a candle for love and Marx in a world drained of affect. What distinguishes his plays are the irregular rhythms of argument, wit, yearning and troubling image. Not for the first time, the argument isn't the most interesting thing. We are familiar with capitalism as our capricious parent, alternately abusive father and insidiously suckling mother. It is the language that crackles and stage pictures that hush the audience, as two apprentices, warily frocked, reinvent themselves as Susan Guzzle and Kitty Fisher. In the modern scenes, the same actors (Dominic Cooper and Paul Ready) are exaggerated, playing a sneer in leather trousers and a ditzy young queen whose hopeful e-mail address is "upforit@compuserve.com".
Our molly knowledge comes largely from prosecution - unlike their modern counterparts, who happily pack a camcorder along with the butt plugs, mollies recounted their pleasures under duress, and the historical Mother Clap survives only in court records. The play takes its title and many details from Rictor Norton's pioneering work of gay archaeology. (Norton has reportedly expressed reservations about the play, especially its depiction of permanently dragged-up mollies.)
John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728), also punctuated by ironic puffs of ballad, identified the kinship between legitimate and black economy. Ravenhill, whose characters are both eager exploiter and hapless commodity - most notably in the rent boy of Shopping and Fucking, urging his own brutal rape - pushes Gay's argument into the supposedly autonomous sphere of sexual pleasure. Everything is up for haggle, even abortion, and although Eros (Paul J Medford in sleek white breeches and wings) stalks the play like a curlicue of temptation, desire and commerce increasingly work hand in hand.
Ravenhill isn't concerned with persecution: "That is the beauty of business," beams Mrs Tull, "it judges no one." As in previous work, he identifies women sidelined by buccaneer sexuality. Danielle Tilley has wonderful comic force as a country whore preserving her virginity to coin it on the streets of London. Tirelessly metaphoric, she turns every mode of speech to lucrative love talk, but finds herself banged up and botched, before eventually taking refuge in breeches. In the modern scenes, Tilley plays a drug dealer's girlfriend poleaxed by choice, taking refuge in relentless piercing, and almost killed by a septic labium.
Tull becomes a trader in self-invention, aptly resplendent in patchwork gown, but her delight in a busy ledger is matched by a yearning for children. Mollies form her pretend family, though a passing reference to the rabbit woman of Godalming, who claimed to give miraculous birth to rabbits, might make us wary about manufactured clans. Nothing is free, whether our romance, our yearning for kin, our most private fantasies: we've become consumers of our own consumption. Ravenhill ends with only the faintest hope of finding love in a (country) cottage.
His intelligence is bracing, and the connections he makes are endlessly provocative. However, although Mother Clap is ambitious in scale and exuberantly imagined (and generously directed by Nicholas Hytner), Ravenhill may still be amplifying his startling first success. We've shopped, we're fucked - what now?
Mother Clap's Molly House continues in repertory at the National Theatre, London SE1 (020 7452 3000)
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