This is an evening full of emotionally explosive monologues. The play starts off with tales of romantic and sexy encounters, but soon leaves you devastated. Patrick Cash sheds light onto this underreported facet on the LGBTQI community – chemsex.
From an angelic porn star to an innocent sexual health worker, the monologues look at a very broad array of perspectives and experiences with chemsex. Most of all, they give a human face to a mystified phenomenon. And the mood is just as diverse as the characters are. This play will send you through all possible emotions, from laughing out loud to the verge of tears in the blink of an eye.
The stage is minimal, only featuring neon lights, a chair and muffled house music in the background, but really that is everything needed to put you into the odd, careless world of chemsex. Impersonal, as Daniel (Matthew Hodson) puts it in his stunning monologue on the experience of a puppy like sexual health worker with chemsex.
Nevertheless, all the stories told are stories of love, whether it is the fondness of an old friend or the concern of a stranger.
Just like The Vagina Monologues, The Chemsex Monologues is a needed piece of education to give nameless subjects a relatable face. An amazingly devised piece that won’t leave you disappointed.