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With lurid tabloid headlines and threats of a Scotland Yard inquiry into indecency offences hanging over the evening, there was an irresistible frisson in the air. The Catalan company La Fura dels Baus - best known for the spectacular opening ceremony of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics - have brought XXX, its infamous adaptation of Marquis de Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom, to the notoriously timorous British public at London's Riverside Studios fringe venue.

The show's opening was quietly spectacular: the words "A better world is possible" scrawled on a giant screen, incontrovertible in sentiment, but given added piquancy by their being scribed by a pen held between the long legs of Teresa Vallejo, playing de Sade's corrupting Madame.

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Writer defends sex show

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At one preview a female member of the cast appeared to perform a sex act on a man from the audience who was invited up on stage.

But according to the director, the man was was a plant and a plastic sex aid was used.

"The sex in XXX is not real but virtual," said Carlos Padrissa, co-producer and co-writer.

"It is all theatre. It looks like real sex and the actors are often naked but it is just touching and kissing."

[...]

"I'm a man of the world, but God, I was stunned at some of the things I saw," Kevin O'Sullivan panted in The Mirror.

"After a particularly intense section featuring a Shetland pony, I'll never be able to think of those tiny equines in quite the same way."

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XXX lets it all hang out

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While the onstage sex is simulated - which is how "XXX," which opened last night, squeaked past London's vice squad - videos go where live actors fear to tread.

Screens at the back of the stage depict every kind of fantasy and perversion, including - Mayor Bloomberg, beware! - a pair of cigarette-puffing vaginas.

And yes, it's interactive: Theatergoers are asked to text-message their fantasies via cell phone during the show - and one spunky viewer each night will be invited to get up there and enact a fantasy.

No word yet on what the Brits will request, but when the show played Spain, one volunteer begged to be beaten; in Germany, several theatergoers stepped onstage to be stripped.

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Furious tabloids detail offensive scenes and provide photographic evidence

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It was, agreed the tabloids, a disgrace; an unforgivable breach of acceptable standards of behaviour. And at no point did it involve George Galloway. "Art? This is nothing more than porn," snorted the Daily Mail yesterday after watching "a shocking stage play which appears to show live sex acts".

XXX, inspired by the Marquis de Sade and performed by a Spanish theatre company at the Riverside Studios in west London, attracted opprobrium all round. "Is this the filthiest play ever staged in Britain?" asked the Daily Express on its front page. On page 19 it had a bash at answering its own question: "New play is 'pure porn'." "Naked gay and group sex scenes were among some of the most explicit ever performed on a British stage," gasped the Sun. "Most were too graphic for the Sun to show here." Note the "most": all the papers that condemned the production felt the need to illustrate their reports extensively, and preferably in colour.

The Daily Mirror took a less hysterical view - "there is one way to avoid being offended ... Don't go," it said, sensibly - and the Daily Star seemed almost excited by the play, "the raunchiest show ever seen on a British stage". So raunchy was the show, felt the Star, that it needed to detail exactly what punters might expect to see on stage.

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[ 27 April 2003: Message edited by: rasmus_raven ]

Doug -- are you an author?

Anyhoo... what I want to know is, is it really true that fully grown people like those theatre critics are really shocked by what they saw, or do they feel obliged to say so? I doubt I would find a single thing there shocking.

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Anyhoo... what I want to know is, is it really true that fully grown people like those theatre critics are really shocked by what they saw, or do they feel obliged to say so?

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all the papers that condemned the production felt the need to illustrate their reports extensively, and preferably in colour.

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I read "Philosophy in the Bedroom", as a slightly autobiograhical tale. It's hard not to read the end of the story and not be thinking of de Sade's relationship with his mother in law.

It sounds like the playwrite was trying to capture something of de Sade. In the matter of sexuality, one thing we can draw upon from de Sade is the eradication of the idea that each generation holds dear: that they invented sex.

de Sade's writtings, if you have the stomach for them, detail pretty much all the stranger kinks we humans have; and this from 200 years ago.

And, we know de Sade had access to a considerable libertine library owned by his uncle, so one can't be faulted for thinking de Sade drew upon older sources for those things even he himself could not bring forth from his imagination.

I don't admire de Sade the author, nor the man. His socio/political philosophy, libertinage, is decidedly right wing, decidedly capitalist. Extended to sexuality, it's the philosophy of the rapist.

While the elder de Sade survived the revolution by taking on it's aires, he was born and shaped as the quentesential spoiled brat of the Ancien Regime.

We might sympathize at his unjust and cruel imprisonment, for most of his life, at the hands of his mother in law. But we must also shudder to think what a free de Sade would have done to the powerless women and children that happened his way.

The reports on this play amuse me to no end. And, I can imagine that de Sade must be laughing maniacly from his unmarked grave at the reviews.