Louise Orwin’s Oh Yes Oh No is a very sexy show about sexual trauma. Or a quite traumatic show about sexual fantasies. It is erotic and horrifying. Seeing it at Summerhall, it is the first show that has brought me to racketing sobs of tears whilst having a hard-on and a damp crotch.
This is a show that I’ve been involved with in various ways for the past few years. It’s been crucial to me, or Louise’s making of this show and the space she has held has been crucial to me. The first time I saw the performance in May 2017 the show itself seemed less powerful than the process we went through to make it. Now, in August 2019, the performance is a masterpiece and goes so much further than a working-through of the material it’s drawn from.
When Louise started making the show we shared books and materials on desire, sexual trauma, surviving rape and sexual assault, and sadomasochism. She introduced space for us to discuss sexual desire and fantasy beyond an attempt at breaking a taboo or as salacious shared gossip about our sex lives. We could discuss our desires as politics, as grand philosophies, as feminist diatribes against the patriarchal system. We extolled the beauty of loving and fucking women and queer folx and the near-constant horror and hilarity of fucking men. Or, more exactly, men fucking us.
I was interviewed as a voice for the show. It was in a studio in summer in Bethnal Green. I was ready to be recorded openly describing WHAT I WANT. I had the list ready in my head. Most of the people recorded for the show are not close friends, and we retained the professionalism of the occasion and subject required. I could not anticipate what came out of that conversation, of being listened to so closely.
WHAT I WANTED turned out to be a record of events that had been written and re-written in my head so many times. And like so many other people Louise spoke to, we veered between discussions of what had been done to me and what I wanted to be done to me and what I wanted to do and what I wanted done to other people and what should be done for us. The whole big fucking mess of fucking splurged out over an hour. That conversation changed so much for me.
I want to make a record of this process to acknowledge the HUGE amount of labour that has gone into Oh Yes Oh No. The depth of research, the conversations, the emotional labour undertaken by so many people but especially by Louise. My personal experience with this process is not the thing that makes the performance good or interesting or important. It is by no means a ‘socially engaged’ piece of theatre. It is not therapy (I need therapy, of course, most of us do).
Three years later, and the developments I have made in the understanding of my shame and desire is entirely separate to the performance. I feel like I know less now, or I know more about the unknowns. This shifting is an experience shared by many of us who contributed, in these years we have changed and transformed. Becoming. Adapting. Perhaps even growing. Individually, we are slowly estranged from that moment where Louise captured our anxieties and wishes.
However, the importance of what is held in those interviews has in no way diminished. Louise tenderly took care of them, grew them, shaped them, merged them. She found the connections, the shared experiences and the incongruences between all of us. She took a deep dive into this water which turned out to be a deep ocean, a rushing river and a stinking swamp and held her breath for a long time. The tides that swell up, the immensity of waves crashing against concrete, the retraction that leaves puddles of dead creatures that rot in the sun. Oh Yes Oh No is all of this. The rancid and the awesome. A powerful force. A drowning girl. A flooded city. A shitty sewage system that pollutes your clear drinking water at the fucking source.
Subjectivity Is So Tiring
In the performance, Louise is totemic for all of our voices. The lines she has written blur and combine the words of hundreds of women which she speaks out in a distorted high pitch. It is not a show about Louise, her voice is there but she stands on stage as a representative of all the things that rush through our heads and nestle in our guts. The things we have wanted to scream but instead have to hold inside our own heads, too scared to share for fear of being alone in what we are thinking. This is where the shame has kept kicking us for so long. Kept us from each other.
It is easy to play the victim as we have been the victim.
Everyone watching wants you to be the victim.
The victim is quite sexy, aren’t they?
Some guy said in a ‘review’ that Louise made an audience member act out a rape with Barbie dolls. This made me laugh. What the audience member is made to play out is a fantasy about hot hot fantasy sex. To be exact it’s a fantasy played out with dolls inside a fantasy space. It’s an incredibly erotic fantasy. After not breathing for a while it was a deep inhale. My skin prickled and my palms got sweaty. I squeezed the thigh of my lover in acknowledgement of just how damn sexy it was. How could this guy get it wrong? Isn’t it obvious?
Immediately after the show, I wanted to fuck but it was more socially acceptable to cry.
People hate being confronted with the messiness of their own existence. If you can face this. If you can face the horror. If you can accept the failure. If you can stand to be humiliated. If you can take responsibility. If you can reach deep down. Deeper. Reach a little deeper. To the left a little. Stretch those fingers out. Oh Yes. If you can reach just there you might cum. You might make someone else cum. You might slip into the warm pool and float together and slide down a waterfall in a magical tumbling of joy and you might avoid the sewage that has been shitted out by thousands of years of humanity.
Oh Yes Oh No does much more than confront you with your own complexity of desire. Or maybe even your behaviour. It asks about social responsibility. Who will clean up the thick stinky polluting shit that stops people getting into that pool, into that ocean, or drowns them when they take the plunge? Are you pissing in there too? Feels good. Feels so good to do it. Does it make a difference? Does this analogy even hold up? Maybe we are like manatees who swim joyfully in their own shit! Or hippos! Maybe the fear of the shit is the problem! Let’s embrace the dirty shitty waters of desire. The freedom of animal desire to eat shit.
And sometimes the shit tastes really good.
And if I like it, so must you?
Why can’t we all just have a good time?
Isn’t that what you want? Isn’t that why you went to the Edinburgh Festival? To have a good time? A nice time. To laugh and be entertained. Or to perhaps to sincerely engage with the stories of people who are oppressed. To learn something. To have an educational moment. To hear about someone else’s difficulties and receive an uplifting ending.
That feels good, doesn’t it?
Do you like that? A little foreplay, a school-book penetration, an easy climax and a nice cuddle at the end. You’ve travelled all the way here to position yourself as a missionary to tell us the truth. All we get is missionary position fucking theatre.
And then you go to Oh Yes Oh No. And it turns out it is not so simple because your complicit in creating all of the shit and there is no escaping that. And also your missionary sex is boring. Your missionary theatre is boring. All these women and queers think you are so boring. That one attempt at ‘kink’ when you bought that kit as a bit of joke from Lovehoney at valentines is dull and clichéd and unimaginative.
Louise tears open a world of ravenous wanting. But this wanting might no longer be for you. The wanting is what I want. For what I want. Or what she wants. Or they want. Sexually, politically, artistically. Do you feel uneasy? Good.
Louise is not an easy ride for you. This show is dripping with the promise of an explosive potential and command that intimidates you. Some pain is wanted. Some pain is gagged for. Some pain creates ugly seeping infected wounds that never heal.
There is cumming and cumming and cumming and screaming and cumming and screaming and cumming and screaming and wanting more than you could ever give.
You can never settle.
It’s all too much.
But it is too much.
We’re too much.
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An* Neely gets credit for calling ‘missionary position theatre.’
Photo: Louise Orwin in Oh Yes Oh No, by Alex Brenner
DISTINCTION 