MiniReview: "Four Play" by Jake Brunger

 What is it?

It’s a play by British playwright Jake Brunger, originally produced in London in 2016.

What’s it about?

Rafe and Pete have been together for seven and a half years, after meeting in university. Now in their mid-twenties, they’ve never had sex with anyone else, and they feel they’re missing out, so they ask their friend Michael (who’s a bit older than them, and in an open relationship) if he will have sex with each of them, separately, and not tell his partner Andrew, who is also a friend of theirs from university. Of course, he does tell Andrew, and events ensue.

Interesting! But that kind of sounds like one scene, not a whole play.

There’s a lot there, because each of the characters has to deal with their own relationship to commitment. It’s that recurring theme in male gay writing: the distinction between love (commitment) and sex (recreation). What I found interesting is that this play zeroes in on that single question and focuses pretty exclusively on that—open relationships versus monogamy, and how “open relationship” is sometimes just a way of giving one of the partners freedom to fuck around while the other stays home and watches videos.

Does it work as a full-length play?

It really does! It’s a sweet, sometimes funny, often poignant play about the fragility of relationships. There are no great flights of oratory here, no earth-shattering insights. It’s just a good, well-written play about real people struggling with their problems. A refreshingly tender gay play.

Stars?

Yeah, I’ll give it a star. An unusual, charming, understated piece of theatre underpinned by some real wisdom about male gay relationships.