SWING (Coronavirus Theatre Club)****

 

By Aashiq

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kibhkp1zynQ

Available until: Unknown

Content warning: This isn’t exactly about a swing in a theatre who understudies every role. In case you were wondering. Strong language, sexual content, probably 18+

As first lines of plays go, this one really grabs your attention! Some people might switch off straight away and that’s okay, we’re all different. But this isn’t the monologue version of Fifty Shades of Grey (can you imagine that with one person? Would you even want to?), it’s deeper than that. (Oh, grow up. I didn’t mean that kind of ‘deeper’ and you know it.)

In Swing, Joshua Griffin plays a guy whose girlfriend is happy to be his girlfriend but she wants to be able to have close encounters with other guys too. Joshua’s character isn’t totally okay with this (and why would he be? If my husband gets any ideas about sleeping with other guys – or girls, for that matter – I would be officially be NOT OKAY WITH IT. He can kiss other people onstage if he has to, that’s his job and it’s actually really hot when it’s another guy, but that’s my LIMIT) so this play is about the character working through his feelings about it, thinking about what he is and isn’t okay with and wondering what to do about it.

It’s an extreme example and extreme is good, extreme is a great way of getting your point across because it makes people listen. (In a play, anyway. In real life, everyone tends to assume I can’t possibly mean what I’m actually saying and they translate it into some boring normal thing which I would never dream of saying but in a play, extreme is good.) But on a very basic level this is something which a lot of couples face. A couple might be totally compatible and genuinely have strong feelings for each other. But what if they have slightly different aims in life, and those aims aren’t compatible?

It’s easy to tell the couple to compromise but sometimes compromise means meeting each other halfway and sometimes it means that one sacrifices what they want in order to make the other one happy. But are there some things which should never be sacrificed?

Mark Jones has written a monologue which has shock value and humour (be honest, we all like a bit of that to some extent) but it also asks a really important question about relationships generally.