Edinburgh Festival, review, Locker Room Talk, Traverse Theatre: Fearsome, amusing, insightful and oddly human

Anonymous words of various males interviewed by Gary McNair reveal their behind-closed-doors views on women, read by four women, delivering the words as they hear them in their earpieces

The play was originally staged as a response to Donald Trump’s ‘grab her by the pussy’ comments

An accepted strand of wisdom says that opinion polls are flawed because only the kind of person who would agree to take part in opinion polls responds to them. If that’s true, then the same also doubtless applies to Gary McNair’s verbatim play Locker Room Talk, which appeared at the same theatre in which the Glasgow-based playwright-performer’s Letters to Morrissey has proven to be a hit of this Fringe.

Originally staged as a fast(ish)-response take on the revelation of Donald Trump’s “grab her by the pussy” comments, which were dismissed by the then-presidential candidate as “locker room talk”, the piece uses the verbatim, anonymous words of various males interviewed by McNair to reveal their behind-closed-doors views on women, from crass courting strategies to secretive codes for evaluating attractiveness and attitudes in the workplace. The trick is that the parts are read by four women, standing in a row behind lecterns and delivering the words as they hear them in their earpieces.

The results are fearsome, amusing, insightful and oddly human in the sense that they lay bare the reality of human interaction in a manner which is neither pretty nor conformist to the idea that everyone operates by the same set of rules in life. Amusingly introduced onstage by the show’s director and Traverse artistic director Orla O’Loughlin in the persona of McNair, the quartet – Jamie Marie Leary, Joanna Tope, Maureen Carr and Rachael Spence – modulate their voices to mimic those they’re channelling, from the gruff back and forth of workmen on building sites to the genteel lawyer in his office.

The moments of highest comedy are in this odd juxtaposition as, for example, one drawling ubermensch harks back to “ten thousand years ago when we were cavemen”. Yet there’s a wealth of casual sexism too, like the idea that the way to bypass a female boss is to wait until she gets pregnant, as well as an undercurrent of horror; in the context of barside “banter” or not, the idea of a “plastic bag job” – a woman so unattractive she has to be asphyxiated before your friends find out you had sex with her – is terrifying.

Yet real awfulness is in short supply and is often not easy to take seriously, like one angry character who yelps “take back the vote!” Instead there’s a general air of dismissal and of treating women as items to be graded sexually, and of greater interest than wading through the off-the-leash misogyny for the sake of it is speculating as to why these men got like this and how. Moments of self-awareness and even a desire for consent flash by, and very few men will deny they’ve heard these conversations staged first hand. If only this striking piece had been on for longer than a day.