Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes

Sexual Conduct of the Middle Classes depicts an ‘affair’ – and its fallout - between Jon (Dan Spielman), a successful novelist and charismatic university lecturer, and Annie (Izabella Yena), his star-struck 19-year-old student.  ‘Affair’ may not have quite the right connotations; the play is very much about the power imbalance between them – and by implication, in the wider world. 

Much of the play consists of Jon’s often amusing confessional monologues - into which Annie, as it were, intrudes.  Apparently self-aware, he sometimes speaks of himself ‘objectively’ in the third person, as if he were a character in his own fiction.  His wit and cynical, politically incorrect self-aware ‘honesty’ (men in the audience may cringe inwardly at the accuracy) is a smart-arse evasion of his motives and the reality of this ‘affair’.  Conceited in a self-deprecating way, he’s toiling on his latest novel and beating himself up because he’s in the midst of yet another failed marriage.  That’s when he notices a student in a red coat – that is, it’s the coat which catches his eye first.  But Annie’s a fan and he’s lonely.  In other words, it’s an opportunity.  As director Petra Kalive comments in her program note, ‘so much of what occurs between Jon and Annie exists in the unspoken.’ And that means that certain assumptions go unquestioned.  Of what, really, does this relationship consist?  For Jon?  For Annie?  She is a talented writer - so is he her mentor?  Lover?  Is there more to it than sex?  She certainly becomes a (mild) obsession, but is it love or his ego?

Dan Spielman also seduces the audience: he plays Jon as charming and ironic, and he has a sort of rumpled boyish good looks – a perfect chick magnet for a certain kind of intelligent, literary-minded student.  Izabella Yena’s Annie is a beautifully modulated detailed performance.  Particularly impressive are the clear stages of the way her character grows up.  Annie is no seductress.  She goes from the naïve and tentative teen almost trembling with uncertainty as Jon puts Band Aids on some cuts she’s sustained trying to climb in her own window, through to a young woman who grows in maturity and authority, capable of reversing that power balance.

Marg Horwell’s deliberately unstructured set allows for the considerable time span of the play and includes Jon’s office, his living room, a lecture theatre, his front yard (allowing for a banal touch of Jon caught mowing his lawn the first time Annie speaks to him) a down-market hotel and an up-market hotel foyer – all enhanced by Rachel Burke’s subtle lighting, which can segue from sombre mood to happy sunlight.

As Petra Kalive also points out, the play’s subject is one about which many have written, but Hannah Moscovitch brings to it a particular insight of her own – an insight and clarity of perception which becomes all too clear in the twist of very last lines of the play. 

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Jeff Busby