Sydney Reviews

Photo – Dan Boud

My First Time is a fun, if perhaps insubstantial, night at the theatre. It has as its source material the virginity loss stories submitted by thousands of users to website myfirsttime.com – stories of sex, love, and loss for the first time. The tales of virginity loss it presents range from the romantic to the horrifying, from the funny to the tender.

The stories are brought to life with vivacity and sensitivity by actors Sharon Millerchip, Josef Ber, Annie Maynard and Kristian Schmid. The four performers have an excellent rapport with each other and with the audience, and the show flows well. Millerchip is perhaps the standout (her performance as a girl from the 1960s who lost her virginity on a beach because that was what she was expected to do if she wanted to keep "going round with Dennis" is both hilarious and heartbreaking), but all four do a great job. They do so well, in fact, that they largely manage to mask the major problem with the show: while the individual tales of virginity loss are all interesting and engaging in their own way, the show lacks a through-line to link it all together.

What is missing, I think, is an exploration of what virginity actually means. The show blithely presents a variety of virginity loss experiences – from awkward fumbling backseat experiences to sweet romances to incest to date rape – without considering the deeper question. Virginity loss is presented as a sort of universal constant – something that will happen to everyone, although it might happen in different ways – without considering what it actually means to lose your virginity. What is virginity? What constitutes losing it? How do you know when you have lost it? What does it mean when you have lost it? What should it mean? And perhaps the most important question is one that this show does not address at all: why is virginity, which is an absence of experience, so commonly figured as an object – something you can lose, give away, throw away, or have stolen?

The fact that the show does not address these more interesting questions is probably due to the subject material. Myfirsttime.com is not a website that dabbles in deconstruction: instead, it is a place for storytelling, and that is what this show does and does well. The performers do a very respectable job in relating a vast number of differing experiences in a comparatively short period of time (I'm not sure that they really needed to use as many accents as they did, but they did manage to differentiate neatly between experiences without confusion). My First Time is perhaps not as thought-provoking as it could have been, but as an exercise in storytelling, it is very entertaining.


Sydney Opera House and Kay & McLean Productions present
MY FIRST TIME
by Ken Davenport and Real People Just Like You | inspired by the website www.MyFirstTime.com | created by Peter Foldy & Craig Stuart

Directed by Jo Turner

Venue: Playhouse, Sydney Opera House
Dates: 3 – 19 January, 2013
Tickets: $39 – $59
Bookings: http://www.sydneyoperahouse.com