Shopping and Fucking is a witty and shocking look at a corrosive disposable world and a numb, desperate generation. The play opened at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1996 and is central to the Nineties movement sometimes called ‘in-yer-face theatre’.

Ravenhill takes the names of his four main characters from pop stars and shows them buying, selling and stealing whatever they can – drugs, sex and ready meals. Mark used to work in the City but is now a recovering junkie; after a topless audition for a shopping channel Lulu is asked to sell ecstasy by her interviewer; Gary, who has been sexually abused by his step-father, is an underage prostitute looking for someone to fulfil his violent fantasies; Robbie tries to make enough to pay the threatening landlord by setting up a phone sex line with Lulu. With a raw mixture of black humour and bleak philosophy, the play shows the lives of disconnected youth reduced to transactions by a dysfunctional consumerist society.

Published by Methuen

90 pages

Condition; Good condition – book in tact and no markings in text. May have annotation on title page