I Drew the Joker: Playing Love Review

It’s safe to say religion is weighing on people’s mind. With the upcoming papal conclave, eyes, minds, and purses are all trained on the Vatican – waiting to see who will lead the Church for the next ten-ish years. One thing is certain: the characters of Playing Love have as much hope as Donald Trump as winning the papacy.

Playing Love bills itself as ‘an episcopal sex comedy’ (thereby making it nothing like the conclave, for, as the characters retort, ‘Catholics believe no one should get laid at all’). Instead, it centres on a dysfunctional throuple of agnostic Anglican priests-in-training (Jeffery, Philip, and Matilda, played by Jonathan Stock, Geordie Coles, and Emily Christaki respectively), along with their long-suffering and long-pining friend Celeste (Tatiana Kneale).

The plot is roughly as follows: Jeffery and Matilda have ditched Philip, but Philip is still lurking in Jeffery’s bed. Oh, and Matilda still loves Philip. And Celeste loves Mathilda. And all of this will be expressed though loquacious metaphors, couched by the tones of the dying vestiges of the British aristocracy.

The (not-so-) happy throuple

A moment to discuss the accents. It’s one of Playing Love’s most striking features –other than its opening with an aborted masturbation attempt that doubles as one of the show’s funniest moments – and, unless we are meant to imagine this play occurring in a sunny version of the 1950s where gay marriage was accepted amongst the clergy, also points to the breezy middle-class bubble that our characters live in.

Along with all the characters going ‘sahd’ instead of said, the audience is practically bombarded with ‘dear hearts’ and ‘old sports’, and the laughs build at ‘Ahhhnglicahhhhn’ and ‘emotional intelligaaaaahhhhhhnce’. The stuffy British tone becomes academic when these accents pepper in endless literary references: everything from Shakespeare to Simone de Beauvoir can be found within the show, before the characters dismiss them with a ‘fuck it’ (or rather, ‘faaauuuuck it’).

It's a show, then, that feels very St Andrews – or rather, an outsider’s tableau of a stereotypical St Andrews (though, for all I know, this could be what really happens in St Mary’s College). Even the set, artfully decorated with tarot cards, the Kama Sutra, and the second year English textbook, feels like something out of the university. The characters are compelled to come and go in order to present their dissertations to their professors (terrifying), and the university dating experience can be summed up by the groups’ emotional immaturity (even worse).

The lesbian lovers that never were

Yet, despite its synergy to the True St Andrews Experience™, Playing Love didn’t connect. Perhaps it’s the reliance on overzealous metaphors – yes, you kicked your lover like a cat at the foot of the bed, and yes, the night is onyx – but when this language is piled on top of each other, line after line, it loses its bite and becomes hazy. It’s a symptom of the play’s dedication to mimicking Oscar Wilde and his ilk—I swear I remember the endless hiding behind sofas and in bedrooms from seeing An Ideal Husband in first year.

The characters have the capacity to be entertaining – I especially liked Christaki’s habit of throwing herself around the stage while flinging verbal and physical missiles – but their garish habits begin to wear after two hours. Nor was the conclusion particularly satisfying. Despite a genuinely touching confession of love from tortured Celeste, a moment of impeccable gravitas for Kneale, the throuple ends up back together, unhappily ever after as they started.

But the St Andrews audience is an upper-class one that seems to enjoy watching farces that reaffirm both their education levels and the depravity of people even richer than them. That’s why Oscar Wilde plays are always so popular.

There is charm to Playing Love, especially in its smaller moments of physical comedy. But there is also a lot of florid dialogue narrating events that ultimately just move in circles. It’s a testament to the production values of People You Know that it was staged with such care, and there is room for growth from the actors and playwright.