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One of the best performances to grace 2024’s Brisbane Comedy Festival, 44 Sex Acts in One Week, was a hilarious, heart-warming, subversive, and intelligent show that stood out like a banana in your pocket.
The story followed Celina, a journalist stuck in the rut of writing clickbait articles for an overbearing and exploitative boss. In order to make her overdue rent, she must take on a challenging assignment. She has one week to road test and review every act in a provocative book titled The 44 Sex Acts That Will Change Your Life. To make matters even more complicated, Celina's only available partner for this daring experiment is Alab, a brooding animal activist and the office mail boy.
On opening night, the fun started before the narrative. Upon entry to the Underground Theatre, we were met with the ideal mix of party atmosphere and safe, welcoming space thanks to the work of Composer and Music Director Steve Toulmin and Lighting and Set Designer Trent Suidgeest.
This outlandish and imaginative show is the highlight of Brisbane Comedy Festival. You’ll never see fruit the same way.
44 Sex Acts In One Week, performed by Club House Productions at the Brisbane Comedy Festival, is a hilariously provocative play that dives deep into the complexities of modern relationships, sex, and the quest for intimacy.
Created by playwright David Finnigan, the show strikes a perfect balance between raunchy humour and genuine emotion, offering a refreshingly honest take on the lengths people will go to in order to connect with each other.
Ever wondered what it might be like to peg someone in a camping supplies store at 10am on a Wednesday? This apocalyptic rom-com is a saucy and slippery subversion of the classic radio play, and asks us if sex can make the world a better place.
Disenchanted lifestyle blogger and closeted academic Celina Valderrama (Emma Harvie) has to do and review every unmentionable in a new book called The 44 Sex Acts that Will Change your Life. Struggling to find a suitable partner who is up for it, she settles on holier-than-thou eco-activist and office mail boy Alab Delusa (Matt Hardie). Diving headlong into the world of kink together, their frenemy friction might just erupt.
Following a sold-out season at Belvoirs Downstairs Theatre in 2020, 44 Sex Acts in One Week will return to Sydney - bigger and (if its actually possible) even better, for a revamped and reimagined season from 12th to 16th January at the Seymour Centre, as part of Sydney Festivals 2022 program.
A show unlike anything else on stage this summer, 44 S*x Acts in One Week is part gig, part radio play, an apocalyptic rom-com created by an exciting new company, Club House Productions in extraordinary times as a joyful response to the madness of these past two years.
With copious bodily fluids and graphic intimacy – plus the ever-present threat of a dying planet – 44 Sex Acts in One Week feels both like a fantasy (remember touching people?) and also far too real. Luckily for us, that’s playwright David Finnigan’s (Kill Climate Deniers) sweet spot.
44 SEX ACTS IN ONE WEEK is just so much wonderful cabaret fun for adults, who just want to laugh out loud. Especially during a pandemic, that never seems to want to go away. The huge laughs are set in these two years, 2022 and 2080.
A very live and fully staged radio play, a quite sexual rom-com with audience participation, plus live sound effects, even funnier when un-synced too. Just what the doctor ordered, when the end of civilisation is upon us, via covid-19-omicron.
... With the offensively multi-talented and multi-award-winning Sheridan Harbridge (Songs for the Fallen) in the director’s chair, the whole thing is in safe hands. Harbridge is fresh from directing the brilliantly horny and unhinged 44 Sex Acts in One Week for Sydney Festival, and you might know her from originating the role of Tessa in hard-hitting one-woman play Prima Facie, which just made a celebrated Broadway debut.
Imagine if an employee of Goop had to road test everything their boss spouted. In one week. That’s the conundrum Celina (Emma Harvie) faces in David Finnigan’s 44 Sex Acts in One Week. She’s a contract writer for a lifestyle clickbait site and she’s in need of cash. When she volunteers to review her influencer boss’s new book, 44 Sex Acts That will Change Your Life, she has to perform each and every act mentioned in seven days to hit her deadline and avoid being evicted.
If you are in a long-term relationship, the idea of 44 Sex Acts in One Week seems more than a little farfetched. Perhaps a year might be more realistic?
The concept did not deter the opening night crowd, who were noticeably younger than many regular Sydney theatregoers. Perhaps they pondered that they might be up for it.
Originally staged downstairs at Belvoir St, this fruity romcom is a hoot and felt at home on the larger arena-like stage of the York Theatre.
Celina is not making rent, and Australian workplace relations law is allowing her boss to hire her only on a contractual basis. To ensure the clickbaity publisher gives her more work, Celina decides to write a review of a social influencer’s controversial new book 44 Sex Acts In One Week, after trying out all of the book’s recommendations.
David Finnigan’s play of the same name however, is not about sex work, even though that is ostensibly what we witness Celina to be engaging in, for the entire duration. Neither is it about the nature of human sexuality in the twenty-first century. The play’s actual concern, is the blind eye we turn, away from ecological disasters that are ongoing in real life.