10/09/2026
Translated from a post by Rado Chmiel - Glad you enjoyed!
“The S*x Party” – Or How I Went With My Wife to a Party We Basically Invited Ourselves To
There are birthday presents you can choose without taking too much of a risk. Flowers, a book, jewellery, dinner. Of course, you can always go overboard and buy something more expensive, but generally speaking, it’s quite difficult to trigger a marital crisis with any of those.
I, however, wanting to celebrate another one of my wife’s birthdays, decided to take a slightly more ambitious approach. After all, Luiza was celebrating yet another eighteenth birthday, and since she’s already had quite a few of those, apparently every additional year is just another percentage point of life’s VAT.
So I took my wife to see The S*x Party.
When I actually said the idea out loud, even I spent a moment wondering whether I was making one of those mistakes that, later on, you simply can’t explain logically.
Because I know Luiza. I know what we like doing together. Food, coffee, theatre, somewhere new that needs checking out, and then more coffee, because apparently one coffee does not constitute a proper evening out.
An erotic party doesn’t rank particularly high on that list.
But the title was intriguing, the venue was small, and I like theatre that tries to do something a little different. Besides, sometimes you need to step outside your comfort zone.
Except that before we’d even had a chance to sit down in the auditorium, this particular play had already entered my life in a way I absolutely hadn’t planned.
It All Started With One B**r
On 27 August, I was sitting in Ma Egerton’s after work with Robbie and Pat. Three blokes who had simply gone for a b**r and a chat. Robbie and Pat are my local old-timers, so I wasn’t expecting anything more complicated from the evening than another conversation about Liverpool, life, and everything else you can discuss at a bar when nobody is in any particular hurry to go home.
Then Zoë Teverson, one of the actresses in The S*x Party, came into the pub after rehearsal.
At first, she was a little shy when she mentioned that she was an actress and was appearing in some show. She even gave us a title along the lines of “The S… Show.”
And honestly, I understand the instinct.
Not everyone wants to walk into a strange pub, approach a group of men and announce:
“Hi, I’m in a play about a swingers’ party.”
Except I knew exactly what she was talking about. I was already planning to take Luiza to see the show.
I pulled out my phone and discreetly showed Zoë the information about the production.
I remember that moment because suddenly the whole situation stopped being a random encounter with someone who had just finished rehearsal. It turned out that the person standing with us at the bar was one of the people I’d be watching onstage a few days later.
And then something happened that happens surprisingly often in Liverpool: we stopped being strangers.
We started talking about theatre, Liverpool, the show and life. Before long, it stopped feeling like “actor meets audience member” and became an ordinary conversation between a few people who simply felt comfortable together.
Zoë seemed slightly surprised by how quickly you can get absorbed into a group here. To be fair, Liverpool still surprises me sometimes too, even though I’ve lived here long enough to know that this city has its own rules when it comes to meeting people.
You don’t need an invitation, an application form or even a particularly good reason.
Sometimes you just need to sit down in the right pub.
And when I left Ma Egerton’s that evening, I already knew that a few days later I’d be sitting in a theatre watching Zoë onstage.
What I didn’t know was that after the performance we’d end up having another b**r together — this time with the rest of the cast as well.
At the time, it seemed quite funny.
Now it mostly seems very Liverpool.
Let’s Swing
And so, on 7 September, I arrived at Hope Street Theatre with Luiza, Robbie and Pat.
I think that was the first moment when I realised that choosing this particular show for my wife’s birthday might turn out to be considerably more interesting than I had initially expected.
Hope Street Theatre is small.
Really small.
The auditorium seats around 85 people, the stage is close, and there’s none of that comfortable distance between actor and audience that lets you sit quietly in the darkness pretending that everything happening in front of you is entirely somebody else’s problem.
Here, you’re close.
And that matters, because The S*x Party makes very deliberate use of that intimacy.
As we sat down, I knew that in a moment I would see someone I had met only a few days earlier in completely different circumstances.
So there was something more than ordinary audience curiosity going on. I felt as though I knew, at least a little, the person I was about to see become one of the characters in the play.
At the same time, I had absolutely no idea what to expect.
The title does rather speak for itself.
We’re Sitting in the Kitchen While the Party Happens Next Door
Terry Johnson places his characters in a very specific situation.
Four couples meet at a house for the party of the title. There are experienced swingers, curious newcomers, and people who don’t seem entirely sure themselves what they actually want.
There’s w**e, cheese, conversation and everything you might expect from a party whose name doesn’t leave much room for interpretation.
Except the audience doesn’t get what it might expect.
We don’t actually watch the swingers’ party.
Instead, we effectively sit in the kitchen with the characters while they talk.
All the swinging action happens in the living room, out of sight. We hear sounds, conversations and reactions coming from the other room. We watch the faces of people trying to maintain appearances, and we have to decide for ourselves what exactly is happening behind the door.
It’s one of those ideas that seems obvious only after somebody else has thought of it.
Move the most important part of the title — and supposedly the action — outside the audience’s field of vision, and suddenly the audience starts doing the set designer’s job.
We imagine what we can’t see.
And imagination, as we all know, is a considerably more dangerous tool than any theatrical prop.
So I sat there in that kitchen and listened.
The longer the play went on, the less I felt as though I was sitting in a theatre.
It felt more like I’d been allowed into somebody’s house and had suddenly discovered that I was overhearing conversations I probably wasn’t supposed to hear.
It’s a wonderfully inappropriate feeling.
And that’s precisely why it works.
When people hear something they’re not supposed to hear, they suddenly listen much more carefully.
It Starts With Laughter. Then It Gets Uncomfortable.
The opening minutes of The S*x Party can easily be taken as an exaggerated comedy of manners.
Awkward situations, sharp dialogue, characters trying to navigate circumstances that seem completely normal to some of them while, for others, their brains are apparently desperately searching for the nearest emergency exit.
We laugh.
But Johnson doesn’t allow us to remain in that safe territory for the entire evening.
As the play progresses, considerably less amusing things begin emerging from underneath the comedy: jealousy, fear, the need for acceptance, loneliness, the desire to be noticed, and that very human need to convince everyone else that we know exactly what we’re doing even when we haven’t got the faintest idea ourselves.
And this was the point when I started looking at the characters differently.
I stopped being interested only in what might happen behind the living-room door.
What was happening in the kitchen became much more interesting.
Why does someone react that way?
Why does someone make a joke just when the situation stops being funny?
Why does someone try to appear confident when they’re clearly beginning to lose control?
S*x is the catalyst here.
It sets the entire chain of events in motion, but the play is really about relationships: about how well we actually know the people we live with, and how easily our idea of who they are can collide with who they really are.
And perhaps that’s why, after a while, you forget you’ve come to see a play called The S*x Party.
You start watching people.
Clothes Say Something About a Person. Nudity Takes Away Their Ability to Hide.
I really like the way the production uses costume.
The characters arrive onstage already carrying a certain amount of meaning. Their clothes tell us something about their personality, the way they behave and their position within the group.
Before they’ve had a chance to tell us everything about themselves, we’ve already been given some of that information for free.
And then comes the moment when the clothes disappear.
Yes, there is nudity in The S*x Party, and it would be difficult to write about the production while pretending that everyone spends two hours sitting around in jumpers discussing the weather.
But the most interesting thing isn’t the sight of naked bodies.
It’s what nudity does to the characters.
Clothes give us control.
We can choose how we look, what we want to communicate about ourselves and what we want to hide behind. We can create the right version of ourselves.
When all of that disappears, what remains is the person.
In one of the play’s strongest scenes, the characters are physically exposed, yet paradoxically that is also when they are at their most vulnerable.
The nudity stops being erotic.
It becomes awkward, sometimes funny and, at moments, simply sad.
And that’s when it struck me that the biggest risk at this entire party isn’t showing your body.
The biggest risk is showing yourself.
A Second Chance for the Play
There’s another reason I found this production interesting.
The S*x Party isn’t an entirely new play. Terry Johnson wrote it earlier, and its first production premiered in London in 2022, receiving mixed and, in places, highly critical reviews.
Johnson returned to his own play, reworked it and prepared a new version.
And perhaps that’s exactly why this production fits so well with the idea of second chances.
Because its characters are also trying to get a second chance.
At a relationship.
At honesty.
At understanding themselves.
Sometimes simply at saying something they couldn’t say before.
Onstage, it feels as though Johnson is now considerably more interested in people than in provocation itself.
We aren’t given one definitive answer to questions about freedom, s*x, relationships or boundaries.
Instead, we get a group of people trapped together in one house, and we watch how quickly their declarations begin to diverge from reality.
A man revises his play, while the play itself is about people trying to revise their lives.
For my wife’s birthday night out, there was quite a lot of philosophy involved.
After the Show, We Meet Everyone Again
After the performance, we went to The Philharmonic.
And this is where something happened that, for this particular evening, was probably almost as important to me as the performance itself.
At one table, we found Zoë, the other actors, people working on the production and Terry Johnson.
Only a short while earlier, I had been watching them onstage.
Now we were sitting together over a b**r, talking like people who had simply finished an evening together.
It’s a strange feeling.
For two hours, you watch someone as a character. You try to understand their behaviour. You observe their gestures, reactions and emotions.
Then, a few minutes later, that same person is sitting next to you talking about what just happened onstage.
We talked about our impressions, what worked, what surprised us and what questions the performance had left us with.
And I really liked the fact that the people behind the production were genuinely interested in the audience’s reactions.
There was no sense that the show had ended and therefore all that remained was to collect your coat and go home.
The performance was still going on.
Only now the pub was the stage, and all of us were writing the script.
At one point, we also discovered that Jack Loy, one of the actors, speaks a little Polish because he spent part of his life in Wrocław.
There’s a Polish connection in the play itself, too. Magdalena, played by Suzy Bloom, plays a Russian woman who was supposedly “won” somewhere in Gdańsk.
Because of course only in Liverpool do you go with your wife to a play called The S*x Party, randomly meet one of the actresses in a pub a few days beforehand, sit down for a b**r with the whole team after the performance, and then discover that one of the actors has Wrocław in his life story.
If someone had written that as a script for me, I’d have said the writer was trying a bit too hard.
And That’s Why I Love Liverpool
As we walked back from the Philharmonic, I realised I couldn’t remember the last time an ordinary trip to the theatre had given me so many additional stories.
It was supposed to be simply Luiza’s birthday evening.
I was going to take my wife to the theatre, watch a show, perhaps have a drink somewhere along the way, and go home.
Instead, a week earlier I randomly met one of the actresses. A few days later I watched her onstage. Then I ended up sitting over a b**r with her, her fellow cast members and the creator of the play.
And that is exactly what I love most about Liverpool.
This city has an extraordinary ability to turn an ordinary trip out of the house into a story that was never part of the plan.
Sometimes it starts with one b**r.
Sometimes with a conversation with a stranger.
Sometimes with a decision that, at first glance, doesn’t seem particularly sensible.
Then Liverpool does its thing, and suddenly you discover that you’ve acquired a story you absolutely never intended to have.
The S*x Party is also the kind of play that genuinely stays with you for a while.
Not because it contains nudity.
Not because it has a provocative title.
And not even because it’s simply funny, although there were plenty of moments when I genuinely laughed.
It stays with you because, after leaving the theatre, you start talking about people.
About who was right, who crossed a line, who really wanted what, who was pretending to be somebody they weren’t, and how much honesty there is in our relationships compared with how much is simply a performance we put on every day for other people — and sometimes even for ourselves.
Perhaps that’s exactly why the kitchen turns out to be the perfect setting for this play.
Because the kitchen is where people usually stop performing.
They sit around a table, pour themselves coffee or w**e, talk about life, and for a moment they’re simply themselves.
And while the party of the title is taking place on the other side of the wall, we remain here, on the safe side of the door, watching the characters’ layers gradually fall away.
Until eventually all that remains is a human being: a little funny, a little lost, sometimes brave, sometimes completely helpless.
Exactly the kind of person you could meet in any pub on Hope Street.
Except here, admission costs a little more than a pint.
The S*x Party can still be seen at Hope Street Theatre on 10 and 11 September. On Thursday, performances are at 2:30pm and 7:30pm, and on Friday at 7:30pm.
So if you fancy seeing something that doesn’t just try to make you laugh but also leaves you with a few questions, there really are only a few opportunities left.
And my wife’s verdict, you ask?
Well, I think the birthday present was a success.
After all, you don’t often get the feeling that you’ve participated in something quite so tangible — or that you’ve just attended the best S*x Party of your life.
Fortunately, we were the ones who got to keep our clothes on!
