Don Juan Who?

I've been mulling this over for a few days. I rarely go to the theatre; if I do, it's to the pantomime, which I love more than anyone else, especially if it is small, regional, and the leading lady is getting rather long in the tooth. Generally, I avoid it like the plague, and I particularly dislike musicals and especially the awful cheesy version of Grease that I went to see in the West End a few years ago. I almost forgot- there was a really good play called A Play What I Wrote; that was brilliant, especially as on the day we went, the guest actor was Miranda Richardson, who played the Queen in Blackadder. It made me weep with laughter, and a chronically ill member of our party guffawed all the way through.
Anyway... Sara, who used to play percussion and sing in No Man's Band, a pre-punk all-female Brighton band, invited me to make up a group of people to go to see this play at the Riverside Theatre in Hammersmith; her sister had devised it, directed it and was also acting in it. Sara's such fun, I couldn't say no ( A New Day was written about her), even though I had misgivings, and wasn't sure I could sit through an hour and forty minutes without fidgeting or falling asleep and snoring.
Well, I did neither of those things. It was a very funny play, is a kind of sly way sometimes, and a boisterous way at others. It had been devised on the internet by British and Slovenian actors. It was very feminist without telling anybody- the nudity (lots of it) was male and at at one point, when I thought 'Oh no, they are going to show the tits now', a woman's body was revealed to show flesh-coloured binding on her chest and a hilarious fake willy-and-balls set made of beige nylon.
There was one pillow fight (looked like a hundred pillows) in which the women buried the men, and a later one where the men buried the women. Sometimes there seemed to be too much writhing, but then there were some very funny 'to camera' type confessions, a dual text with words projected n the backcloth (often mocking the storyline), and constant translation into Slovenian which sometimes turned the English words into a joke, just by clever use of facial expression.
What did I think? It was very well done, and I found the actors' faces fascinating. I didn't feel enlightened, but I did feel amused, and the wry cynicism poked fun at both men and women, highlighting cliche without resorting to it. I didn't fall asleep, snore, burp, fart or doodle; it was interesting all the way through, so I didn't look at my watch; there was something very up-to-the-minute about it, as though all the ideas were hot off the press, and it was really energetic. So for a rare foray to the theatre, it was definitely worth it, and all the better for catching up with Sara too.