In Sex Magick, Amelia is fed up with her luckless love life and turns to a vaginal therapist/mystic spiritual healer in the hopes that she’ll be able to win the affection of her childhood crush, Julian. This is not a kinky nor an erotic show but an unfortunately limp comedy. It sounds promising and the energetic cast all give committed performances, but I can’t say that I sincerely laughed once.
Our eccentric mystic healer is Luna (Anca Vaida) and the gag is that she quite clearly makes it all up as she goes along. After waving her hands and making voodoo noises, her ludicrous actions makes things worse for Amelia (Natasha Zierhofer). Despite this, Amelia continues to run back to Luna for help throughout the show.
Amelia’s love interest is Julian (Hugo Linton). Beyond the fact that he’s an actor and he has a slight resemblance to Eddie Redmayne, not much more is revealed about him. Lastly, Amelia’s no nonsense roommate, Jo (Jade Love) is one of the more interesting characters. The serial dater, who is obsessed with her weight, is the much needed voice of reason in the show and is arguably under-utilised.
It’s clear from the outset that this play, created Natasha Zierhofer, doesn’t want to be taken too seriously. But with an 80-minute running time, many of the scenes felt repetitive and one too many one liners didn’t quite land with the audience.
There are also some notable pacing issues. When at last we are introduced to the concept of Sex Magick roughly half way through the show, it is somewhat disappointing to learn that it involves masturbating with a cucumber to the Macarena and setting curses.
As comedy is subjective, I’m sure there will be others who reach a different view than my own. But saying vagina multiple times, throwing a tampon around and having a wooden dildo as a prop doesn’t necessarily make a show fun. With little meaningful character development and not much of a story arc, you are most likely left thinking where is this all going?
In one bizarre scene, Luna makes Julian repeatedly chant that he hates his penis until he has a breakdown, says he wants to be a woman and dances around in a red dress. I’m still not quite sure what the humour in this is meant to be.
Comedy is hard and despite my reservations, I think Sex Magick’s efforts at staging an original show should be commended. But unfortunately, it didn’t quite work its Magick on me.
Sex Magick is playing at the Barons Court Theatre and runs from 11 June to 29 June at the time of writing.
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