SWEETMEAT
3-24 November 2024 at the Old Red Lion Theatre (London, Islington)
7.30pm
'I was born to feel my blood vessels burst under your teeth.'
How far would you go to fulfil your fantasy?
Sigmund has been tormented by sadistic desires since childhood, fuelled by online echo chambers and tenuously restrained by SSRIs. When his fiancée breaks off their engagement and he loses his flat, he moves in with Christian, an eccentric librarian with a painful past. As their shared obsessions come to the fore, their relationship mutates from companionship to love to something intense and terrifying.
With video projection and elements of verbatim theatre and folklore, Sweetmeat is a sizzling new story created by a majority queer team that touches on gay loneliness, fantasy, pain, and internet escapism through the lens of a love that burns too bright.
Content Warning: self-harm, suicide, abusive relationships
Written by Ivo de Jager
Directed by Connor Geoghegan
Starring Matthew Dunlop & Jamie McClean
Lighting by Jess Parritt
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"The whole show feels akin to a string on a violin continually being wound by the tuning peg until it snaps (...) It’s a pace that is rarely done so well in writing, and if Alfred Hitchcock were still alive he’d undoubtedly be all over this."
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