Review: Jerker
Robert Chesley's two-hander at Waterloo East.
Forty years after it's premiere in San Francisco, Robert Chesley's Jerker is being revived at Waterloo East theatre in London.
Jerker is a two-person drama about strangers who connect through a series of late-night phone calls. What begins as anonymous fantasy develops into something deeper.
Hidden from each other’s sight, the men reveal secrets, fears, and longings through nothing but their voices. Each call pulls them further into an intimate world where imagination becomes a lifeline, where the line between fantasy and genuine connection begins to blur, raising the question of who they really are to one another.
The play explores how intimacy can grow in isolation as the characters journey into desire, vulnerability, and the power of being heard.
The review
Directed by Henry Adams, the cast for this production is Paul Dennison as JR and James Lee as Bert.
This is the first time that I've seen Jerker, and I haven't read the play, so I experienced this as a stand-alone piece of theatre.
Overall, I enjoyed it. It's a tight production that effectively brings to life the dynamic of two men making an intimate connection via phone.
Set in 1985, Jerker is a period piece - revealing how the early years of the AIDS pandemic is shaping the lives and experiences of these men.
The narrative is linear and easy to follow as the succession of telephone conversations unfolds the stories of JR and Bert and the connection that they've built over time.
This is a sex-positive piece of theatre. The initial conversations between JR and Bert are focused on sexual fantasies that they're sharing as they masturbate. I really like seeing that presented on stage.
We get a bit of nakedness from the actors in this production. I'd actually liked to have seen more nakedness - not just because I like seeing naked men on stage but also because I think this play is an opportunity to illustrate the power of nakedness in terms of vulnerability and authenticity.
Delivered as a one-act, 80-minute play, the theatre as a no re-admissions policy, which is fair enough. Three people walked out during the production - separately, all middle-aged men (which was very much the demographic of the audience). The third walk-out I'm guessing was needing to go to the bathroom. The other two seemed to be triggered by the incest fantasy that JR and Bert were exploring in their conversations - a bit of brother-on-brother action. It was relatively vanilla as far as incest fantasies go, but I can see how that might be problematic if that triggers a trauma response for you - there weren't any trigger-warnings on any of the posters that I saw.
The cast was solid. The character of Bert seems to have a lot more emotional range to play with, which leaves the character of JR feeling a bit one-note.
There also seems to be a couple of elements of confusion in the script that must complicate casting. We're told that JR served in the Vietnam war, which suggests that he's older than Bert. But in the incest role-play, Bert takes the role of older brother. While all of that's totally possible in the world of role-play, from an audience perspective it would have felt clearer if the older character had taken the role of the older brother and that could then be reflected in the casting.
This production uses short clips of music as the ellipsis between each phone-call. The tracks used are all well-known tunes from around the era in which this story is set. It's totally understandable why this choice has been made but it seems to distract from the emotional arc of the characters and distances the audience from the story being told.
Bottom line, this is a good gay play that helps remind us what queer men were navigating in the 1980s. It's definitely worth seeing.
Jerker is on at Waterloo East until 18 October
Gareth Johnson