If people browse the Comedy Festival guide like they surf the internet, the first thing they’ll hit is Sexual Perversity. So it was the first thing The Pun hit.

Audience members entered this four-hander play wearing badges boasting ‘Sexy’ or ‘Perv’ and were greeted at lights up by Muddy Waters’ ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’ and tight brown lounge suits bulging at the crotch. It’s a bar scene and Bernie (David Bramble) sweats sexual animalism as he regales his mate Danny (Ben Griffiths) with last night’s conquest. It could almost be a scene from Underbelly 2, with Bernie spitting lines through his handlebar moustache.

But it’s not. Sexual Perversity in Chicago was written by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright David Mamet back in the early seventies – and it feels that way. Women’s liberation was well underway and masculinity in this new shared space was being tested. References to war and immaturity splatter the bawdy script as the two men grate and gyrate against the two women, played by Kellie Tori and Eleanor Jones. However these themes flit in and out of view, overpowered by the standard men-versus-women theme comedy audiences are so familiar with.

The actors and director Ami-Lou Sharpe have worked hard to keep the show pacy – and the spot-lit set is simple, stylish and effective – but the tone is uneven. Drama and subtext sat mostly separate to the comedic potential of gender politics or Bernie’s buffoonery and they undermined each other. Mamet has a reputation for dialogue that veers from sharp and direct to unfinished and indirect, but this preview show left us wondering if something was lost when shortening the original 70-80 minute play to 60 minutes.

If you’re heading along, embrace the characters’ immaturity for the most enjoyment.

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