Consenting Adults always had strong women in the company, but most of the plays on offer had a token woman character who was either a threat to men’s enjoyment or a motherly type whose job was to follow the men about figuratively with a mop and bucket clearing up their mess; to paraphrase Mrs Lintott the history teacher in Alan Bennett’s ‘The History Boys’.
In 1980 we had Jan and Nikki, who if they were not an item were at least a splendid double act. We were intending to go to Edinburgh for the Festival, and we had an all-boys play in ‘Teatrolley’, so I balanced it up with a two hander for Jan and Nikki, ‘Seesaw’.
The play was set in a kids’ nursery with the eponymous seesaw and giant building blocks – tea chests, of course. The two characters acted out the adult games they play as children’s games, sometimes power games, sometimes passive-aggressive sympathy games.
However, while I was writing it for two female actors, I set myself the challenge of writing a play which was entirely non-gender specific. This was thirty years before gender identity politics had taken root in our collective psyches.
The names of the characters, Chris and Pat, were androgynous, but the main challenge came in the stage directions avoiding ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘her’, ‘him’. Nowadays we would use ‘they’ and ‘them’ without thought, but in 1980 this would have been a heinous grammatical crime to my pedantic little mind.
Over the next three years we revived with play twice, and it was also mounted by a gay theatre company in Brighton and one in Amsterdam. In those productions we went through all the possible permutations of gender in the casting: Male - Male; Male - Female; Female - Male.
Each production brought out different psychological dynamics, as the notions of gender which the actors and directors entertained played out in various ways. Of all the Consenting Adults plays this one had the broadest appeal to gay and straight audiences alike.
Read the Script
Peter Scott-Presland
April 2025
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