Content Warning: discussion of sexual assault 

Contains mild spoilers

On Wednesday night, I had the pleasure of watching the opening night of ThreeBUGS Fringe society’s Semester 1 production, Re-rovered, written and directed by Heather Collier. This play certainly marked a tonal shift from other comedy pieces, like Footnotes’ Jumpers for Goalposts, WatchThis’ ’48 Hour’ productions also performed this semester, and indeed the restoration comedy from which Collier’s story is adapted, Aphra Behn’s The Rovers. The Re-rovered I saw on Wednesday night was a scrupulous, darkly comic attack on modern attitudes towards sexual assault, but one which held no scruples in its approach to this weighty matter.

Collier’s programme summarises Re-rovered as where ‘Restoration and Libertine rakes of the late 1600s’ take form in a ‘playfully visceral performance of lad culture…questioning social complicity to rape culture.’ Indeed, a way of appropriating this theme for a modern audience was through the pre-recorded video footage on a projector screen, a framing device to preface the embedded action (performed live on stage).

Styling this footage as an educational video designed to tackle workplace sexual harassment ironically jarred against video narrator Ben’s (James Morris) audacious pass made at a co-worker, his complacent swivelling in his chair, and his subsequent distorting on the screen by iMac PhotoBooth effects. This, in tandem with the freezing, glitching and looping within this video, trivialised attitudes towards sexual assault which would be subsequently matched and superseded through the fictionalised action.

The spring break premise within the embedded action was a clever means of shifting into a fresh diegetic whilst allowing all shifty behaviour seen in the preceding video to be exacerbated. The party environment allowed us to see Willmore’s (Luke Pierce-Powell) various sexual interactions, with Florinda (Milly Allweis), Hellena (Esme Banerjee) and Angelica Bianca (Katherine Greenhalgh), in-between conversations with his loutish lads: Blunt (James Morris), Don Antonio (Ozzie Osgun) and Belville (James Gaultrey).

Though all performances were credible, I must praise how well Luke Pierce-Powell played the twisted sleaze who convinced Angelica Bianca — the jaded influencer, acclaimed movie-star, now-turned-strip artist — that he loved her. Theway in which we saw the lad pacify the woman who initially yelled at him to leave her dressing room, to later yield to sleeping with him, was chilling to watch within the duration of one scene, especially as Angelica’s final words of this scene were “I’m not sure”. What this scene reflected was how consent can be negated, even within the modern world.

In contrast to the deeper themes it conveyed, Re-rovered also supplied moments of digestible, light-hearted, ensemble entertainment. A visually appetising colour scheme manifested in bright patterns, fruit-print shirts and metallic masquerade masks, the latter of which gave a Romeo and Juliet feel amongst Hellena and Blunt dancing. A beautiful moment was created when Blunt bounced a toy fox on the limbs of the ensemble circling him like a conveyer belt, only to find Hellena also holding a similar prop. Contemporary pop underscored these club scenes, including Lizzo’s ‘Truth Hurts,’ Martin Solveig & Dragonette’s ‘Hello,’ and ABBA’s ‘Gimme Gimme.’ But when lyrics like ‘doesn’t really mean that I’m into you’ blare, we again see the trivial rimmed with the political.

Brechtian elements also rove freely in the play, from each location being named on the projector screen, to a minimalist set, to occasional moments of direct address. ‘Offstage’ did not exist for actors not in a scene; they faced each other in two rows of chairs perpendicular to the audience, and to the projector screen on the other side. When I first entered the Debating Hall, it was easy not to feel like the actors were spectators themselves.

The end of the play turned the audience into spectators of their own lives, however, as articles from the past few decades appeared on the projector, the most modern being a BBC article on the increase of spiking in clubs. With some societies at the University boycotting Guild and city-centre club nights, Re-rovered has never felt more pertinent. To end with the words of Helen Collier, ‘this is a play which hopes it still isn’t playing the same time next year. That would mean it’s working.’

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