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Rachel Mars: Your Sexts are Shit: Older Better Letters at Soho Theatre

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Time 19:30
Date 14/06/22
Price £14.5

A new filthy, funny and intimate solo show, triangulating the sex and love letters of long dead artists, contemporary sexts and a meditation on the construction of the queer female body.

Tuesday 14 - Saturday 18 June, 19:30.

Award-winning theatre maker Rachel Mars visits Soho Theatre for the first time with a gloriously rude new show that unearths the hot-as-hell letters that make sexts blush.

Before sexts there were hand-written letters. And loads of them were proper filthy. With the help of the internet, friends and two sexologists, Rachel has unearthed missives dating back centuries. Triangulating these sex and love letters of long dead artists with contemporary sexts and a meditation on the construction of the queer female body, the show is a tender and surprising hour that asks – how do we write ourselves and for whom?

Come! Take pleasure in James Joyce’s passion for arse, find out who sneaked her gay lover into the White House, hear from Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keeffe, Mozart and bear witness to the best/worst sexts ever sent.

 

Here's what Mars says:
In June 2016, immediately after the Brexit vote I was depressed and in upstate New York. In order to cheer me up, performer Scott Sheppard read me some of Joyce's sex letters to Nora Barnacle.  They are beautiful, filthy, honest and surprising.

'You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat  fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole.' - James Joyce, letter to Nora Barnacle, 1908

On returning home I went in search of other fantastic sex and love letters, and with the help of the internet, friends and two sexologists - Jana Funke and Lena Wanggren - unearthed letters dating back centuries. I called out for people’s sexts and dating app chats, and I went back through the ways I had used writing to construct my own identity.

'I am on my back – waiting to be spread wide apart – waiting for you, to die with the sense of you – the pleasure of you – the sensuousness of you touching the sensuousness of me – all my body – all of me is waiting for you to touch the center of  me with the center of you.' - Georgia O'Keeffe, letter to Alfred Stieglitz, 1922


'What at first seemed to be a comedy show poking fun at the differences in historical and modern sexting, instead becomes a historical insight into sex and the queer narratives that are so easily lost within history.' ★★★★ - Ed Fest Mag


'A triumphant show...dripping with uninhibited desire' - ★★★★ Guardian


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