Perve

by Stacey Gregg

Tackles a subject that grabs headlines but looks beyond the sensationalist coverage to find answers to difficult questions. Perve is an irreverent and unsettling play that interrogates paranoia, ambiguity and innocence in our highly sexualized world.

Genres: Plays

80 pages, Paperback

First published April 10, 2012

Reviews

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

I fared better with this, Gregg's debut play, than I did with her subsequent Lagan, but even here she shows more potential than firm control of her material. It doesn't help that there appears to be a major formatting error on the second to the last page of the printed script (shame on NHB's copy editors), but as the following review makes clear, even in performance the ending didn't quite work. Up till then, it's a solid, intriguing, if messy work, tackling an uncomfortable subject matter with elan.

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/201...

[Charlie Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very well written but incredibly uncomfortable play to read. The dialogue is authentic for a working-class midlands dialect—Stacey Gregg clearly has a good ear. The scenes where the Authority question those involved, with all their various insinuations, are perhaps the most uncomfortable I've felt reading a play.

The playwright is obviously very talented and tackles some black, some white, and some complex grey areas. It's fair to say the protagonist's research project goes a little too far when rumours get out of hand and people start to piece together otherwise seemingly innocuous threads into a seriously damming tapestry.

I don't know if I would reread this because of how uncomfortable I felt, but that's kind of the point. Somehow it made me feel more tense than other works on the same subject, like Philip Ridley's The Fastest Clock in the Universe and Neil Labute's In a Dark, Dark House.

[Rocio Quintana · Rating 4 out of 5]

The clever and strategic way in which the writer handles the implications of cancel culture is brilliant. She deals with the topic with the respect that it demands.

[Jenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I flew through this play ridiculously fast, because watching the events unfold was so gripping. The way that Gethin's concept becomes the centre of the play in such a twisted way was brutal and believable, showing a moral grey area of society that we still haven't figured out how to navigate yet. The scenes with the authority were almost difficult to read at times because there was no clear good or bad guy, and that's difficult to accept when discussing a topic that is so clearly wrong in every way. I don't know why I haven't heard of this play before, but people need to read/see it.