In the Next Room, or the vibrator play

Overview

It's almost obvious when you think about it. The vibrator did not first appear in history to bring women sexual pleasure; it appeared to make them manageable. It took some private revelations and a mass revolution before the device was reclaimed for its rightful purpose.

In the Next Room, or the vibrator play is set in the late 19th century, when the advent of electricity led physicians to upgrade the previously manual technique of 'pelvic massage' they used to treat female 'hysteria', an umbrella illness whose symptoms could include faintness, nervousness, irritability, insomnia and/or "a tendency to cause trouble". The eventuating 'hysterical paroxysm' (ahem) would cure all lady ills. In this environment, the wide-eyed, restless and maternally troubled Catherine Givings (Jacqueline McKenzie) begins to listen at the door of her husband Dr Givings' (David Roberts) office. She finds the sounds coming from it most compelling. Drawn to meet the patients within — the soon rejuvenated Mrs Daldry (Helen Thomson); the rare male hysteric, an artist who's lost the use of his paintbrush, Mr Irving (Josh McConville) — she makes discoveries about her body, her relationship and the nature of intimacy.

It's a period of history that holds a rich seam of material — a perfect junction of women's oppression, scientific subjectivity and the general quirks of Victoriana — and In the Next Room mines it using the weight of dramatic irony carried in by the clued-in postmodern audience. As you'd expect, watching a person have an orgasm on stage when they don't know what's happening to them is funny. Stuffy doctors showing off their inadvertently sexy inventions are funny. Double entendres are funny. A theatrical audience has never laughed this hard. The pleasant surprise, though, is that uncannily perceptive and heavily awarded young American playwright Sarah Ruhl has bestowed beautiful, random, entirely non-sex-related humour, too, and a warm, open meditation on the role of sex in society and in our inner lives. Only poor wet nurse Elizabeth (Sara Zwangobani) is given short shrift, culminating in an odd and overwrought clash with Mrs Givings.

With its charming heroine, its lush and zeitgeist-containing costumes ('buttoned up' could have been coined just for referring to the Victorians) and its ornate, painterly set (Tracy Grant Lord) where walls blend into curtains, lights pointedly flicker and zap and you're enveloped in a living room fit for Jane Austen herself, In the Next Room is an incredibly fun and accessible work, and still a bit illuminating for its 21st-century onlookers.