It was a portrait of Arnold Schwarzenegger clad in bathing trunks God she continued look at those arms The man’s a freak of

It was a portrait of Arnold Schwarzenegger, clad in bathing trunks “God,” she continued, “look at those arms The man’s a freak of nature. That is so ugly.” Diagonally below was a shot of a smirking S&M-er with a huge slab of wood suspended from his dangly bits. One was reminded of anobscenity case a few years ago codenamed Operation Spanner. The police, apparently, chose that soubriquet because anyone who saw the pictures felt his nuts tighten.I don’t know about the whole obscenity question I have a feeling that a great deal of it is hot air. But one thing’s for certain: Robert Mapplethorpe must pose a bit of a threat to the average relationship.

Musing over the succinctly named “Cock”, in which a vast phallus is grasped by an equally vast fist, a man turned to his female companion “A fine figure of a penis, that one,” he said “Mmm,” she replied enthusiastically. “It is.” Her face bore that sort of dreamy expression one associates with too much ice-cream.. You know where you are with Harold Pinter – in the sense that you can rest assured you won’t know precisely where you are. Ashes to Ashes, his new play, is set in a room that seems bent on not giving anything away. A perfect riot of beige, it has all the anonymity of hotel accommodation, with its two beige armchairs, two beige tables, and two beige lampshades.

If it weren’t for the large domestic window, you’d be looking round for the beige mini-bar. We catch the fortysomething couple who live here in the middle of a charged conversation. Badgered with insistent questions by her current partner, Devlin (Stephen Rea), Lindsay Duncan’s Rebecca is describing a sado-masochistic ritual she used to engage in with a former, unnamed lover who would make her kiss his fist and then ask him to put his hand round her throat. In her account of this practice, the difference between compulsion and voluntary compliance gets oddly blurred, just as the relationship we are watching on stage, though it’s evidently between long-term intimates, has a sinister smack of that between interrogator and prisoner.
Devlin’s obsessive curiosity about his partner’s erotic past and Rebecca’s use of “subjective” memories in their power game is reminiscent of the situation in one of this author’s finest plays, Old Times, re-scored here for two voices rather than three. But, in some of the rhetorical tactics and the references, there are also eerie reminders of the inquisitions Pinter dramatised in those short, sharp, shock political plays One for the Road, Mountain Language and The New World Order.This index-linking in Ashes to Ashes between the private and public worlds becomes more explicit when Rebecca recalls having been taken by her ex- lover to see a sinister-sounding factory where a cap-doffing, intimidated workforce are the obedient vassals of unbenevolent despotism. We were gathered together to celebrate the union of Gina, a cockney girl from Bethnal Green and Joey, the perma-tanned offspring of a family of Chicago hoods. There were late arrivals and comic antics with the candles, speeches and songs The Bethnal Green dynasty clashed with the Chicagoans.