Playing the field

TIM Fountain is a very naughty boy. He has, he says, had sex with 5,048 men and one lesbian.

Many of the men were perfect strangers whom he met on the internet in gay chatrooms, a process the playwright describes as his favourite pastime. It is also the subject of his new play, opening this week at the Royal Court.

Tim Fountain: Sex Addict caused a huge furore at last summer's Edinburgh Fringe. Each night in front of a live audience he would trawl Gaydar, the gay internet site, looking for a man with whom to have sex. The audience voted who he should pick, and at the end of the show Fountain would meet him, have sex, and report back to the following night's audience, with photographic evidence.

But after just a few nights, Gaydar sought legal advice and Fountain had to stop using the site. He put a brave face on it, claiming the whole thing had been a set-up and the "men" he went to meet was a "mate from Torquay", as it were.

"It was crisis management," Fountain now admits. "I had to do a major rewrite, there was panic, and I really didn't want to lose several thousand pounds by closing the show, so I invented this friend."

The show limped on for the rest of its run but in his frantic rewrites and (by necessity) more interaction with the audience, it became less a piece about male gay behaviour and more an exploration of modern sexual mores, straight, gay and all points between and beyond. What began as an idea formed one drunken afternoon at his west London flat is now a more serious attempt to explore our sexual conduct. Fountain argues it is a much better show because of its "bigger remit".

Fountain, 37, is well respected in British theatre. An only child, brought up over his parents' pub in Dewsbury, Yorkshire, he started writing in his teens - "they stopped being shocked by my work a long time ago" - and has a CV full of work in the West End and off Broadway. His plays include Julie Burchill is Away, and Resident Alien (about the cross-dressing Quentin Crisp); he adapted Toby Young's How to Lose Friends and Alienate People for London and New York and for Channel 4 he wrote an episode of the Bob and Margaret cartoon.

As literary manager at the Bush Theatre between 1997 and 2001, Fountain-discovered new talents including-Charlotte Jones (who wrote Humble-Boy) and Enda Walsh (Disco Pigs).

So how does a professional theatre man end up with a show that adds camwank, rimming and fisting to the prompter's lexicon? "I'm a showman, I suppose," says Fountain with an accent wholly Yorkshire. "There's more Barnum and Bailey in me than Beckett, that's for sure."

Ian Rickson, the Court's artistic director, says of Fountain's work: "He takes you into a certain world with so much detail and intimacy, which is extraordinary." Of Sex Addict, he says: "It is a fascinating and original piece."

For the Royal Court performances, Fountain has set up an interactive website, www.timfountainsexaddict.

com, inviting people to have sex with him. Visitors can leave their details on the site and, if the audience so decides, they can have an online chat with Fountain during the show, or become that night's sexual partner.

The Court's lawyers have indicated exactly what can and can't be shown during Sex Addict, which nonetheless is littered with verbally and visually explicit material. As Fountain says: "The law is incredibly vague. My view is, if you post pictures of your cock on the web, what right to privacy can you claim?"

Sex Addict is not for the easily shockable, and even if The Daily Telegraph described it in Edinburgh as "jolly" and "engaging", it will have to work at the Royal Court as a piece of theatre, not just a bit of fringe late-night fun. So which is it?

"Both, I hope," says Fountain. "I don't make any great claims about this being a work of art, but it does make people talk about stuff. In Edinburgh, we had one very posh middleaged lady talking about her love of rimming. I love theatre that's out there, and this show is certainly out there.

"I am genuinely interested in looking at something that is new - getting sex when you want it and getting the precise sort of sex you want just by typing in the key words in a search engine." Does Fountain think the internet needs more controls?

"I'm a libertarian, so I don't want anything regulated," he replies. "But I do think the impact of internet sex raises questions that need answering."

Where does he draw the line sexually? "Fisting and bestiality aren't really for me," Fountain says, the latter because it's non- consensual.

"Although," he then deadpans: "sometimes they're asking for it.

BUT there is a serious intent in this show. I think what will be fascinating is how many women will be willing to talk about how they want casual sex, too. I think women, just as much as men, are up for it, but society doesn't acknowledge this aspect of female behaviour, and a woman's called a slut where a man is called a stud.

Even in the straight chatrooms it's all about meeting for dinner and getting to know someone first, and it's all so dishonest. Why can't women be allowed to say what they really want?"

There are serious issues about this work being staged at the Royal Court, rather than, say, a pub in Vauxhall.

In effect the publicly funded Court is procuring sex for Fountain. He laughs out loud at the notion of "sex on the rates" - saying "I wish!" - but admits that doing the show in such an esteemed venue gives him a buzz. "For me, there's an interesting frisson between what the show is about and what the Court represents in British theatre," he says.

Even if we accept that this is a work which has a right to be seen, is it not perhaps dismissable as an inflated ego trip for a phallocentric playwright? "I am sure that some people will say that it's complete and utter trash, but others will see the questions being raised as worth discussing," he says. "Does the internet reflect people's behaviour, or has it instigated it? It is a show that - I hope - will entertain people at the same time as they consider questions of morality."

And what morality is that? "I think it is a deeply moral show because the least moral thing we can do is lie, and we as a nation generally lie about our sexual desires and behaviour."

. Tim Fountain: Sex Addict is at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs from Thursday Information: 020 7565 5000.

(c)2005. Associated Newspapers Ltd.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.