The Surrender is a play about sex. While there are some bits and pieces around the edges it is, by and large, about sex. Specifically anal sex. The protagonist and author of the book The Surrender, Toni Bentley, played by Swiss actress Isabelle Stoffel, takes us through her life, from her beginnings as a ballet dancer, through her affairs with various men, before she meets the man she can finally ‘surrender’ to.
While the play’s subject matter is somewhat puzzling, Stoffel, while she is alone on stage with only a few props for company, manages to capture our attention very well. The script certainly does not beat around the bush (so to speak) with regard to the nitty gritty of Bentley’s sexual encounters and Stoffel played up to this, infusing the script with comedy at times and bringing the tone down at others. This monologue certainly didn’t come across as over-rehearsed or false, which was another testament to Stoffel’s prowess in the role: any young actresses would do well to watch this play as a performance in naturalistic and emotional acting.
That said, the play does go on at length about the apparent joys within the Bentley’s backside. While the blurb for this piece might label it a ‘hilarious and erotic memoir’, in reality there is ten minutes either side of the bulk of the play that is not wholly devoted to discussing anal sex encounters and even then sex in general features prominently in those as well. While the play does not become awkward or seedy during Bentley’s descriptions of the joys of anal sex, or how it can essentially substitute an entire relationship and allow sexual liberation through submission, it does become a tad tiresome and pretentious. I found it hard to be able to read quite as many things into such an act as the author did and that the sexual encounters - what they represented or made the character ‘feel’ - were dressed up to such an extent that they started to grate at a certain point.
That said, this is a fine play. It is a credit to both Stoffel and Bentley that a play so singularly about so sensitive a subject manages to work as well as this does.
