Banging Denmark Read online

  Photo by Chelsea Thistlewaite

  VAN BADHAM is an internationally award-winning writer, activist and occasional broadcaster, whose essays, fiction and criticism have appeared in numerous publications and whose plays have been staged all over the world. She began a weekly column in Guardian Australia in 2013 and appears regularly on television. Her published books include the plays Muff and The Bull, The Moon and the Coronet of Stars, the YA novel Burnt Snow, and several essays and poetry. She tweets at @vanbadham.

  ‘Van Badham may have one of the biggest and quickest minds in Australia, but it’s her huge heart that takes the stage. Not unlike Van, Banging Denmark is a play that speaks its mind with edge, wit and heart. By the end of it you can’t help but feel enraged, endeared and ultimately, empowered. Van Badham has created the ultimate political rom-com, a battle of the sexes that’s an entertaining aphrodisiac.’

  Nakkiah Lui

  BANGING DENMARK

  A PLAY BY

  VAN BADHAM

  A NewSouth book

  Published by

  NewSouth Publishing

  University of New South Wales Press Ltd

  University of New South Wales

  Sydney NSW 2052

  AUSTRALIA

  newsouthpublishing.com

  © Van Badham 2019

  First published 2019

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

  Any performance or public reading of Banging Denmark is forbidden unless a licence has been received from the author or author’s agent. The purchase of this book in no way gives the purchaser the right to perform the play in public, whether by means of a stage production or reading. All applications for public performance should be addressed to Shanahan, PO Box 1509, Darlinghurst, NSW 1300, Australia; tel: +61 2 8202 1800; email: [email protected]

  ISBN: 9781742236452 (paperback)

  9781742244624 (ebook)

  9781742249117 (ePDF)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia

  Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

  Original playscript series cover design Sandy Cull, www.sandycull.com

  Cover image Shutterstock

  This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  First production details

  BANGING DENMARK

  INTRODUCTION

  VAN BADHAM

  He was a guy I knew from the independent theatre scene in Melbourne. He was younger than me, and while I didn’t find him attractive, I could appreciate he was a pretty boy. Pale eyes shone from underneath the costumes he used to gad about in – fake eyelashes, sometimes, which is why I’m remembering his eyes. Facepaint, on other nights. There were the occasional gold boots he’d wear to parties, leather coats that swept the floor behind him. At a writers’ festival, he turned up in a kilt. To a boozy reception in Melbourne Town Hall, he wore a black feather boa. A friend of mine was fucking him when he and I met – occasionally, and ‘not exclusively’, as he’d explained to her with emphasis and precision, although she didn’t date anyone else. I hadn’t been in town long, but soon found myself acquainted with a broader community of women who admitted to sleeping with him; when they were drunk, when they were lonely, when they were bored. He had funny tattoos on his chest and his belly, they told me. It was all a bit of fun, they’d say, the seduction, the sex … but this was always described in a slightly acrid tone, as if the receipt to their entertainment was a resentment that would always linger. More than once, I found myself in conversations about him that cut themselves short, unsaid words that hung in the air. Was he a rapist? ‘No,’ said one of these girls one night, half to me, half to her wineglass, ‘just a bit of a dick’.

  The metaphor seemed to encapsulate him – his reputation with girls, their use for him, the kind of theatre he made … which was narcissistic and often naked, always well-lit and – it was rumoured – funded by his wealthy parents. Yes, he was pretty … but I’d watch him at parties, deep in conversation with girl after girl who already knew he had nothing to say, his pale eyes lit with the reflection of their upturned attention, his hand on their shoulder, nodding, not smiling, his knee brushing their knee, and I’d wonder; just why is this prick so damn popular? At a party south of the river, the memory burns of him leaning on his hand against a refrigerator in the kitchen, a young woman between him and the icebox. He wore a leather jacket that night, no shirt at all – the cartoon tattoos on his belly, just like his attentions, quite visible. The two left together in minutes. It was joked about in the kitchen afterwards, by the boys and the girls who remained. ‘I think that’s a record,’ someone said to their watch, and everyone laughed. We congregated at a pub north of the river the very next night, and, there he turned up, still shirtless from the night before, his eyes ringed with dark liner. The group sat a wooden picnic table in the beer garden, and amidst beers and jokes and cigarettes, I realised there was already another young woman under the crook of his arm. Again, he left early, and not alone. ‘What is it about?!’ I exclaimed, once he’d departed. The boys at the table shrugged, smiled … and changed the conversation.

  He was still fucking my friend – ‘not exclusively’, and some weeks later – when an impromptu gathering unfurled in my flat after a show one night. Twenty people crammed my studio with wine and pizza, and he was there. So was she, my friend, with her feet hurting, and a vague medical problem, and a repeated suggestion to him that he accompany her back to her hotel, which he ignored. Finally, she left, in emergency slippers, her high heels in a plastic bag. He was holding court at the dining room table when the front door closed behind her, telling stories without punchlines, batting his eyes and chuckling at punchlines provided by others. He wore a military beret that night, and a t-shirt with razored sleeves. He gestured that I should sit next to him. He poured me a wine. Perhaps he had forgotten that I do not drink. He bumped his shoulder into mine a couple of times. He squeezed my knee. And then he broke from the table’s conversation, looked into my eyes, and placed a hand on my thigh and he said: ‘Your makeup looks really pretty tonight. Did it take you a long time to do?’

  ‘I’m not here to give you tips, love,’ I said, blowing a kiss, and flicked his hand from my leg. I thought of my friend, her painful feet, her lonely hotel room. I stood up. ‘I want to go to bed,’ I told the party, ‘so y’all have to leave’. I made sure when I said the word ‘y’all’, I looked at him. Then I physically pushed people out of my flat. He seemed to lurk around the hallway, but I just shut the door.

  A few days later, I was in Hobart, and in a lazy stroll around Salamanca Bay, ran into a Melbourne friend. She’d missed the latest party, if not others – she was one of the gentleman’s former lovers. She’d been away from Melbourne for a while, and asked for gossip. We got coffee. I talked about the party in my flat. ‘I think he was trying to pick me up,’ I said, incredulous, of him.

  ‘Did he try a line?’

  ‘He told me my makeup looked pretty – ’

  ‘ – and he asked you how long that it took,’ she said, with a smile the same flavour as her milkless coffee. She grunted. ‘He was picking you up, straight outta the book. Friend, that boy was running game.’

  My eyes were spoon-wide as she talked me through new meanings of old words. In Hobart, I learned about the world of the pickup artists, as this friend unspooled the mystery of the tattooed-belly man.

  The book of which she spoke was N
eil Strauss’ The Game, published in 2005. It’s an autobiography, of a sort, in which the geeky author joins a ‘secret society’ of male pickup artists, and learns their techniques for picking up women for sex, generously shared with the reader. It spent months on the bestseller lists, and was once retailed with a leather jacket and satin inserts, like some kind of sex bible – which it was, to awkward young men eager to participate in the act if not so much in the emotional lives of the human women that said act obliged them to involve. The book taught a generation of men to ‘neg’ women with backhanded compliments – about their makeup, for example – to bait their attentions, and provoke a need for external validation. It formularised processes for initiating casual physical contact that would culminate in seduction. And it recommended ‘peacocking’ – a social performance of dressing yourself in such a way as to draw visual attention, start conversations, make a unique impression.

  I saw kilts, facepaint, golden boots – and red. I replayed my entire experience with the peacock I’d encountered in Melbourne, and realised the stage for the theatre he made wasn’t Melbourne’s poky halls and unused spaces, but his world, with all the women in it merely props. And in the eyes of my companion at the café table, I finally understood the cold reality of the resentment she shared with so many; the bastard hadn’t even written his own script to this. He’d downloaded it. On Kindle.

  The magician doesn’t reveal the secret to his tricks, because once the tricks are known, the crowds stop coming. Once you have learned the language of the pickup artists, their own seductive magic ceases. It wasn’t so long after my Salamanca encounter that I noticed a herd immunity developing amidst the women of my circle, attempts to ‘neg’ called out, shut down, and public mockery of pea-cocks. Overnight, it seemed, the great Melbourne bird had disappeared – my friend with the sore feet had finally dumped him. I saw him once at a theatre thing, failing to seduce a young woman in a beer garden, who shook her head, sucked on a cigarette, and clearly thought he was a bit of a clown. Some years later, I saw a Facebook post from somewhere that alluded to his partnership with an eel-thin, wild-eyed woman, declarations of their love expressed online in the syntax and vocabulary of an aggressive marketing campaign. It instantly made me wonder if he was still sleeping around.

  Most of all I became curious as to what had happened in the decade since to all the other birds – the kind of men who once bought the Neil Strauss bible and bowed down before the gurus of the Game … but whose prayers now went unheard. I went looking for them on the internet, and found a commercial pickup community selling new tricks to aspirant seducers, with promises of fresh schemes to which women have not yet tumbled. Fascinated, I strayed further into the spaces of the online ‘manosphere’, where male loneliness is a ripe market for self-help charlatans and ‘men’s rights’ mountebanks to shift products – books, courses, workshops, subscriptions, memberships, recordings – as likely to be a cure for isolation and despair as the finest snake oil ever was.

  For all the aggression and misogyny – the gross objectification of women – that soaks those communities and their ongoing complaints about ‘females’, I can not bring myself to hate such men as a much as I felt sadness for them.

  A review of Strauss’ book once described its ‘sell’ as one in which ‘the ubergeeky can often give a convincing simulation of being a regular human being, even if … they are in fact near-sociopaths’. My own experiences of misogynistic harassment and abuse on the internet have taught me too well how sociopathy thrives in these communities, and the Venn overlap among narcissists, bigots and men who game women as sexual objects is certainly strong. And yet I can’t shake the notion that a compulsive pursuit of sexual conquest engaged in by so many men in these communities comes from a damaged, inarticulate and barely understood desperation for intimacy, coupled with a terror of its requisite self-revelation.

  Because what the young gentleman of Melbourne always knew was that under the costume and tattoos of the unassailable, invulnerable young player in a feather boa, there was another, pale-eyed thing – one that, to know desire, had to dress itself up and learn lines from a book. Such an entity made of several selves, may, indeed, have consistently been ‘a bit of a dick’ … but I think of his smeared eyeliner, and facepaint, his own clumsy makeup … and no part of me feels any less sorry towards him for that.

  March 2019

  Banging Denmark was first produced by the Sydney Theatre Company at the Sydney Opera House on 26 July 2019, with the following cast:

  TOBY BELLO

  Patrick Jhanur

  ANNE TOFT

  Michelle Lim Davidson

  ISHTAR MADIGAN

  Amber McMahon

  JAKE NEWHOUSE/GUY DEWITT

  TJ Power

  DR DENYSE KIM

  Megan Wilding

  Director, Jessica Arthur

  Designer, Renée Mulder

  Lighting Designer, Veronique Benett

  Composer & Sound Designer, Clemence Williams

  Assistant Director, Tasnim Hossain

  Voice & Text Coach, Charmian Gradwell

  CHARACTERS

  JAKE NEWHOUSE, a management consultant, somewhat possessed by his alter-ego Guy DeWitt (‘Guy’ pronounced the French way, ‘Gui’): a pickup artist / lifestyle coach / manosphere sex guru. Early 30s.

  ISHTAR ‘ISH’ MADIGAN, a feminist academic and author, completing a PhD on representations of female sexuality in video games. Mid-to-late 30s.

  DENYSE KIM, a computer science academic, and genius. Barely mid-20s. Ish’s friend.

  ANNE TOFT, a research librarian at a city library, on a study placement from Denmark. Late 20s.

  TOBY BELLO, a postgraduate student in pure mathematics, same age as Denyse, also a genius, and her friend.

  There are other voices, that phone into the live-recording of the Guy DeWitt podcast, ‘Santa Claus … Is Coming’:

  WARHAMMERBOB

  MRTEARSDRY

  EVIL COMPUTER

  COMPUTER CHORAL VOICE

  CAPTAINASS

  There’s also A NEIGHBOUR.

  Colour-blind casting is encouraged.

  SETTING

  The play is set in a western city of such a size that it contains both a university campus and a library.

  SCENE ONE

  In which JAKE – who calls himself Guy – counsels his (exclusively male) flock on the nature of courtship in the modern era.

  Darkness.

  A Hollywood crooner’s cover of ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’ plays in a low-lit, indistinct room. JAKE is in this room. After only a couple of phrases, he does something (unseen) to fade out the music. We are listening to the live recording of a podcast.

  JAKE: Just ask yourself: do you want to stay a sexless little elf stuck with a frozen north pole – or be the guy who goes out and gets up any chimney he wants, and have bitches putting cookies out for you?

  Because, boys – Santa Claus can come, come, come to town, in any town, any time, every night of the goddamn year, if you decide to give a one present to yourself: my simple, man-to-man, no bullshit, five-step dating success programme: ‘Fuck Her Now, Fuck Her Then, Fuck Her Whenever’ – downloadable as an e-book, audio or video webinar.

  Five steps is all it takes to unwrap the psychology of the female mind, spread the woman you want like a slab of Christmas cake, toast a frosty bitch into sticky marshmallow and stick your fork into all the pudding you can eat … and I guarantee – 100%, and for only $49.95 – all your Christmases will come – and come, and come – at once. [Beat, then quick change of tone, something switched] Caller, this is Santa Claus … Is Coming! – the only seduction community podcast recorded live via the interwebs, and this is your host Guy DeWitt, nestled in the breast of the only woman I will ever truly love – my beautiful yacht, the Open Hole! – Caller, you’re on the air – !

  Lights come up very slowly over the course of this conversation – but not to the point where things are distinct by its end – the
room must remain mysterious.

  WARHAMMERBOB: Mah man, Da Wit!

  JAKE: I know this voice –

  WARHAMMERBOB: Da Witty Man! I seen your name written down: Guy De Witt. You know you’re a real ‘Witty Guy’, huh?

  JAKE: I believe we’re talking to WarhammerBob, trainee real estate agent from Oak Flats this morning. Bob – how’s that fine Brazilian piece of ass you’re chasing?

  BOB: She’s from Colombia –

  JAKE: I wasn’t talking about where she was from [Bob chuckles] – I was talking about her well-kept ass, Bob! That ass you’ve been twisting yourself up to get inside – !

  WARHAMMERBOB: Twisting my wrist so much it hurts …

  JAKE: Listeners, our gentleman caller Bob met this Colombian girl, she friend-zoned him and for weeks she’s been giving him –

  He flicks a switch on his sound board.

  SOUNDBOARD: Blue balls …

  Blue balls …

  Blu-u-u-e … balls.

  WARHAMMERBOB: For, like, a month!

  JAKE: … And you went to a party she was at on the weekend, how did that pan out?

  WARHAMMERBOB: Like you said; I just straight and told her she looked like crap –

  JAKE: I bet she’s not used to that –

  WARHAMMERBOB: And when she was crying in the bathroom, I got a few drinks into her best friend –

  JAKE: Were you kissing the friend when she came out of the bathroom?

  WARHAMMERBOB: Hell yeah!

  JAKE: And what did you do when she got hysterical at you?

  WARHAMMERBOB: I just walked out.

  JAKE: Good boy!

  WARHAMMERBOB: Oh man –