Daily Mail: Play about gay saunas is “sleazy” and “amoral”
Theatre critic Quentin Letts has condemned a “taxpayer funded” National Theatre play that is set in a gay sauna.
The critic wrote a review for the Mail this week savaging ‘John’, a show at the National Theatre which examines the life of a man in a sauna.
Under the headline “A National DISGRACE: Sleazy. Amoral. And paid for by you!”, Mr Letts condemned the play as “just a seamy, sorry exercise, shorn of morals”, which is “full of men showing us their whatnots, in at least one case semi-erect”.
He added: “We are told of an orgy of 15 men. We see two blokes seemingly pleasuring themselves. There is a ballet of buggery, an offstage gay rape, endless talk about what complete strangers get up to in saunas.
“One charming scene is devoted to the amount of excrement left in saunas after a busy night.
“You taxpayers are helping to fund this.
“Here is our Royal National Theatre celebrating sleazy joints where boys are raped, given deadly infections, a milieu devoid of love, a world where it is somehow considered fine to be selfish.”
Mr Letts adds that he hopes he can brand it a “discrace” without being “accused of homophobia” – because he “[has written] in support of gay rights since the late Nineties”.
