Ravenhill Plays: 1: Shopping And F***ing; Faust Is Dead; Handbag; Some Explicit Polaroids (Contemporary Dramatists) - Plot & Excerpts
The settings on the internal network, designed to inhibit the sending of obscene or abusive e-mails, was preventing anyone mentioning the name of one of the Court’s most successful plays of the 1990s: Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking. The story reminds us of the persistently disruptive nature of a play whose title could not be displayed outside theatres, printed in full in newspapers or on book covers, nor spoken unprompted on the telephone. Ravenhill is very good at titles, and this one has entered the public consciousness in a way that no play has done perhaps since Look Back in Anger forty years before. No doubt it contributed to the international success of this play: two West End runs, a national and international tour, and dozens of other productions around the world. Along the way, as the play transferred into larger and larger theatres, some of the subtlety of the play might have got trampled down by its ‘scandalous’ reputation. There was, undoubtedly, a thrill in seeing this defiantly young, queer, strutting play occupy three West End theatres.
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