Synopses & Reviews
This ground-breaking drama was Mark Ravenhill's first full-length play and part of a movement in the 1990s of "in your face" British theatre which frankly dealt with issues of sex and violence and pointedly challenged societal values. The play explores how consumerism has become our new value system which reduces everything else to a mere transaction, as shopping malls become the new cathedrals of Western consumerism.
The plot follows a crowd of drifters and sex traders in a seedy area of London in the 1990s. Five main characters are linked loosely and intermittently and at the center of the play is an ever-changing love triangle of petty criminals. It is a gritty, grimy urban society, a depressing microcosm of drugs, shoplifting, prostitution, and sexual adventure. The characters have shunned morality and conduct hedonistic and destructive lives in this shocking, humorous, nihilistic play that examines a completely corrupted society.
Review
"A darkly humorous play for today's twenty-somethings … a real coup de theatre"—Evening Standard
Synopsis
Shopping and F***ing is
Falling in love with your best friend - if you can get the right mix of Es and whizz
Passion buried beneath layers of bubble and wrap and cellophane
A world where microwaves are the only source of heat
A place where Shopping is sexy and F***ing is a job
And if you killed someone what would it feel like? Or maybe there are no feelings left
Shopping and F***ing is a witty and shocking look at a corrosive disposable world whose values have been determined by a disinherited generation.
SHOPPING AND FUCKING: "is a darkly humorous play for today's twenty-somethings
a real coup de theatre" - Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard