The Vulgarians — dirty words are just the tip of the iceberg

A meet-cute this is not. In fact, by the time we meet the husband and wife played by Nicholas Pauling and Emily Child in the new, electric, eccentric little play by Louis Viljoen, The Vulgarians, the couple would appear to have had quite enough of one another. 

There’s even a frisson of danger, a suggestion that the husband’s fury might spill over into violence. 

It’s complicated, too, by whatever you might know about Viljoen’s way with words: sometimes the violence is in the language, sometimes the words feel like weapons, but sometimes his words are placeholders for actual bloodlust and gut-spilling atrocities due to be meted out.  

Rest assured, though, that while this sharp two-hander does indeed spill into something sufficiently physical to evoke the feeling of having something slide down the back of your throat while being made aware of a slightly uncomfortable, warm, wet sensation somewhere in the region of your sphincter, it is not in fact a play about physical violence. Or at least not the sort that involves blood and dismemberment. 

The substrate of the play – short, fast-paced, hard work for actors and audience alike – is familiar. 

A couple, at home after some sort of social gathering, are in the middle of a domestic battle. She has infringed upon the rules of marriage, created reason for him to suspect her of infidelity. The row that unfolds involves less shouting and screaming and physical aggression and a far more creative war of words. And herein lies the rub.

Viljoen uses the potential cliché of a presumably unhappy marriage as an excuse to demonstrate his literary cleverness – and his taste for hyperbolic linguistic excess. 

The play is an opportunity to unleash not only (sometimes overly) complex and difficult dialogue saturated with big, beautiful and occasionally unfamiliar or out-of-popular-use words, but an absolute litany of swears, salacious insults and vividly described depravities. 

We witness, up close in the intimate space of the Baxter’s Masambe Theatre, this husband and wife having a good go at one another. But might it be that the husband’s accusations are unfounded, that the only real crime has been one of putting into words some momentary fantasy that popped into the wife’s imagination in a moment of boredom? Or, are we in fact witnessing a game of words played by lovers who understand the sexual charge contained by beautifully fashioned sentences? Is what we’re observing actually a kind of oral foreplay?

The play is not for you if you’re easily offended, flinch at crude language or are likely to be triggered by graphic sex talk. 

It’s in the title: The Vulgarians is potty-mouthed and in many ways filthy. In fact, the use of invectives and lengthy descriptions of all sorts of body parts and a multitudinous array of things that might be done with them in the pursuit of some inconceivably vague and secret pleasure, constitutes perhaps the play’s central conceit – it seems to want to shock the audience, have us all rush out to google the sex acts that are so coarsely and matter-of-factly described.

Despite this, I am almost certain that Viljoen’s latest play is a romantic comedy. A thoroughly topsy-turvy love story afflicted by all kinds of problems that you might associate with any long-term relationship, but a love story nevertheless – and one that made me laugh out loud. 

And, despite Viljoen’s best attempts at grossing out the audience, what his play ultimately succeeded in doing was to give me hope that, with the right amount of conversation and the right (or wrong) kind of sex, even the most jaded and long-suffering and not-so-happily-married couples can find some common ground.

Some might find it offensively common, but that’s a matter of taste.

Getting to that point of common ground, the play suggests, may require a degree of contortionist-level bedroom Tetris, some flexing and relaxing of the sphincter muscles, and rather precise bladder control. These are but mere details, though. The real trick to a happy marriage, it seems, is being open and truthful with one another, and being unafraid to introduce a little danger and a not inconsiderable quantity of bodily fluid into the relationship. That too might be missing the point, though. 

It’s a point that’s easy to miss because Viljoen’s language is marked by a kind of cleverness that comes very close to relegating itself into obscurity. Some of the sentences are so long and complicated and rife with meaning that your brain almost wants to shut down. But it can’t, because those sentences are interesting, meaty, full of the dirtiest swearwords, the most foul and depraved descriptions of situations you cannot help but visualise. 

They are also laser-focused on some very core issues. Like trust and honesty and asking yourself just how far from your perceived normal you’d be prepared to go in the interests of keeping your partner happy and your relationship fresh. And, if you do pay close attention and listen very carefully to the words coming out of the mouths of the actors’ mouths, you may just pick up a couple of lessons in love. You will also, whether you wish to or not, learn one or two new moves.

Child and Pauling are hypnotic in the play – it’s like watching a game of strip chess, the charge between the characters they portray as potent as their performances are funny. Child is a marvel of calm restraint in the face of having her innermost fantasies dredged up, and Pauling’s depiction of internalised horror as he realises what he must do in order to save his marriage is absolutely spot on.

Also excellent is the set, a clever solution for a play that in many ways exists between realities, brilliantly designed by Kieran McGregor. The costumes, rather summery, give the atmosphere a welcome lift, too. One regret, I thought, is that the lively back-and-forth between the two gifted actors is repeatedly interrupted by lengthy recorded monologues that bookend the play’s short, swift, racy scenes; I’d have preferred to watch more of the action unfold and spend less time listening to something akin to radio. 

The recordings are a crutch as much as they are instances of the play interrupting itself.

Another tiny suggestion is that Viljoen gives his plays to another director. I suspect that by directing his own writing he may be missing some of his own jokes, sidestepping his best insights. One danger of directing your own play is that you have too-clear – too-certain – an idea of what it is trying to say. I’d be interested to see what another director discovers between the cracks of this very unusual love story. DM

The Vulgarians is playing at the Baxter’s Masambe Theatre until 22 November.