It is a truism that “transgressive” art is for the most part
drearily conformist—shocking and controversial only about
things its audience already agrees on: Giuliani is a Nazi,
religious people are repressed sex fiends, etc., etc. So it comes
as a pleasant surprise to find, at London’s Royal National
Theatre, a play that is genuinely transgressive. Not in its many
scenes of simulated sodomy punctuated by “butt plugs,” “rimming,”
“golden showers”—yawn, yawn, been there, done that, you’re
probably saying—but in the message its many gay sex acts
convey.

Mother Clap’s Molly House is by Mark Ravenhill, celebrated author
of the 1996 hit Shopping and Fucking, with its memorable finale
of an anal rape with a fork (shopping and forking?). Five years
on, Ravenhill has graduated from the bad-boy precincts of the
Royal Court to the mainstream respectability of the National, but
his preoccupations are the same as before—if
you prefer, love and consumerism. For gay men, sex and
commerce have long been intertwined, even in the language (“a bit
of rough trade”). Ravenhill’s text is loosely based on a study of
London’s eighteenth-century gay culture by Rictor Norton, also called
Mother Clap’s Molly House, after a gay
tavern-cum-brothel-cum-music-hall in Holborn run by one Margaret
Clap and the target of a notorious raid, the Stonewall of the
1720s. Ravenhill’s play diverges somewhat from its source and its
dialogue is not always punctilious about period detail, but the
world it portrays is plausibly drawn.

The playwright