Shopping and Fucking
Mark Ravenhill's first full-length play, Shopping and Fucking, was produced by the Royal Court and Out of Joint and was first performed at the Ambassador's Theatre in London in 1996 before a national and international tour.
When Shopping and Fucking was first produced it received mixed reviews. Some were clearly shocked by the play's sexually violent content, which included the pseudo-rape of an underage male by other males. Other critics were drawn to the play's black humour, and its mixture of Sadean and Marxist philosophies. Whatever one's opinion of Shopping and Fucking, it is true to say that the play was at the cutting edge of In-yer-face movement of 1990s British Theatre, along with the late Sarah Kane's Blasted.
Central Themes
The sexual violence of Shopping and Fucking explores what is possible if consumerism supercedes all other moral codes. To this effect everything, included sex, violence and drugs, is reduced to a mere transaction in an age where shopping centres are the new cathedrals of Western consumerism. This is similar to work's by the Marquis de Sade where, in the absence of religion, there are no moral absolutes. The hyper-consumerist tone of the play echos the capiltalism sauvage of Thatcherist ideology. Indeed, three of the protagonists (Mark, Robbie, and Lulu) would have been teenagers during Margaret Thatcher's stretch as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
Aspects of consumerism recur throughout the play: Drugs, prostitution, sex lines, theft, shop robbery and oral sex in the London department store Harvey Nichols. Even the character's names (Mark, Robbie, Gary, and Lulu) are taken from the 1990s manufactured boy band Take That.