Matt Warman
posted 8 September 2006

Shakespeare, nobody should forget, wrote for money. And he retired well before he might have done, so it seems fair to assume that his art was not his first and only love in life. His plays, if not directly commissioned, were latterly intended to fill a gap at his own theatre and by extension increase his own income. It is in that sense alone that Tanika Gupta has something in common with Shakespeare. There has been, to this theatregoer's knowledge, no recent play that felt as intended purely to earn a paycheque as Sugar Mummies.

It would be mean to liken Gupta's actions to those of the Jamaican (male) prostitutes with which her play deals. But they are always open about their pleasuring of women, usually of a certain age, being a mere bought service, and Gupta has indeed spoken about this play's 'commissioning'. One might expect, especially at a theatre such as the Royal Court, an exploration of why women go to such lengths to find physical gratification, why they are then apparently so inclined to convince themselves that they've found rather more than just that, and what either of those scenarios mean to the Jamaican locals. To be fair to Gupta, she touches on all those issues, but there's little sense of her having crawled inside the heads of the characters she shows us, and even less sign of any treasures found within.

The most interesting character is Naomi (lithely played by Vinette Robinson), who is on the island looking for her long-lost father. Through the timeless lens of the broken, brief relationship, Gupta seemingly seeks to say something about our modern fractured society and our failing search for personal meaning. Naomi finds her father, of course, and it turns out that Reefie (Victor Romero Evans) is a pimp. One doubts whether any author would draw such a sympathetic portrait of such an occupation if it were women he were exploiting, but even so Evans succeeds in making Reefie's moral quiddity thoroughly ambiguous. This might work for Iago, but here, where more focus is desperately needed, it deadens the interest.

The star of the show is Lynda Bellingham, all breasts and thighs, proving that older women have every right to be sexual and sexy. Her character Maggie is the most knowing, and so her tying a boy up and beating him with surprising savagery does have genuine power. But even these ideas are left curiously under-developed - what might be the one moment of a soul finally being revealed to an audience might too plausibly be read just as a moment of (intellectually uninteresting) madness.

Still, there are fascinating themes here, and moments of risqué hilarity too. But there's nothing radical per se in a play about ladies wanting to get laid. Sugar Mummies is now touring to Bolton and Birmingham, so perhaps its London run could be considered just ongoing development, and in the coming month these profound topics - sexuality, femininity and male power - will be given the play they deserve.

London run over.