Shopping and Fucking

This ground-breaking drama was Mark Ravenhill's first full-length play and part of a movement in the 1990s of "in your face" British theatre which frankly dealt with issues of sex and violence and pointedly challenged societal values. The play explores how consumerism has become our new value system which reduces everything else to a mere transaction, as shopping malls become the new cathedrals of Western consumerism. The plot follows a crowd of drifters and sex traders in a seedy area of London in the 1990s. Five main characters are linked loosely and intermittently and at the center of the play is an ever-changing love triangle of petty criminals. It is a gritty, grimy urban society, a depressing microcosm of drugs, shoplifting, prostitution, and sexual adventure. The characters have shunned morality and conduct hedonistic and destructive lives in this shocking, humorous, nihilistic play that examines a completely corrupted society.