Sugar Mummies

by Mark Shenton

In the midst of its 50th birthday celebrations, you might think that the Royal Court is taking a well-deserved summer holiday. The playing area is covered in sand, a little boat called Sun Dance 1 is tethered to a pier, there’s a cyclorama above the stage onto which are projected changing images of skies and palm trees and there are several around. But don’t get too comfortable just yet. The three English women and one African-American who variously occupy those sunbeds in Tanika Gupta’s new play Sugar Mummies have other things on their minds than the sea and sand on offer under the Jamaica sun.

Javone Prince & Heather Craney
in Sugar Mummies

While female prostitution has had a long theatrical pedigree, from apparently innocuous musicals like Sweet Charity and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas to a more documentary-like approach of the current Edinburgh Fringe hit Unprotected, and rentboys have become a theatrical staple of 1990s playwriting thanks to plays like Shopping and Fucking, Gupta’s play breaks new ground for examining a lesser known phenomenon—the female sex tourist who goes to Jamaica in search of cheap, convenient and highly idealised men to pay and play with. It is some way away, though, from the sunny holiday romance of Shirley Valentine’s right of passage in Greece. This is intended to be far more gritty.

There’s a limpness to both the writing and the staging, which means that, for all the sparky, likeable energy of the strong ensemble cast, it doesn’t entirely stand up. Gupta wrote the play to commission, with the Royal Court sending her to Negril beach to research the phenomenon first hand. Her own two weeks in the sun have led to a predictable purchase on the situation. While it aspires to bring an even-handed approach that shows the cost for both parties—the exploitation of the men and the sustaining delusions of the women who are paying for them—the play feels both contrived in its plotting (particularly of a subplot regarding the youngest of the women, a Jamaican-born architect, searching for her father) and compromised in its politics. Gupta cannot disguise her disapproval, of the inadvertent racism of the women (in bed, one tells her lover, “You eat like a savage”) or the empty opportunism of the men.

While it seeks to put human flesh on the documentary contours that inspired it, but it only fitfully fires as drama. Instead, it emerges as a sketchy, fragmentary and disjointed portrait of its characters, but one that can’t keep all their stories buoyant and interconnected to make a sustained narrative.

Indhu Rubasingham’s production, with its constant shuffling of beach perspectives on Lez Brotherston’s handsome set, keeps interrupting the flow to change another scene, rather than having them seamlessly blend into each other. But the actors, at least, inhabit their uninhibited roles with conviction. Lynda Bellingham, Heather Cranley and Adjoa Andoh respectively partner Jason Frederick, Javone Prince and Victor Romero Evans to varying degrees of failure. But a more hopeful romance springs up between Vinette Robinson’s Naomi and Marcel McCalla’s Andre that takes them outside of the sex-for-sale arena—a kind of love and mutual affection that can’t be bought or faked.

Sugar Mummies
By Tanika Gupta
Directed by Indhu Rubasingham
Royal Court Theatre