Caught in the act

If you thought sex on stage had reached its climax, Spanish show 'XXX' could come as a surprise, says Aleks Sierz. But are we really still shocked by explicitness in the theatre?

Mrs Patrick Campbell, Victorian actress and friend of George Bernard Shaw, is reputed to have once said: "I don't mind where people make love, so long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses." Although depictions of sex on stage have frightened critics – if not horses – ever since, what exactly is it about breaking taboos in public that makes people nervous? And does the concept of "sexual taboo" make any sense in an age where you can watch porn on cable television and visit lap-dancing clubs in any town? London audiences will have a chance to confront such questions later this month with the arrival of Spanish shock troupe La Fura dels Baus. Their version of the Marquis de Sade's 1795 classic, Philosophy in the Bedroom, entitled XXX, is no sedate night-out at the theatre. The updated plot is about the corruption of ingénue Eugénie by three porn actors – and the almost unwatchable climax sees Eugénie organising the gangbang of her own mother in revenge for her moral upbringing.

Other moments in the show are more humorous, but equally confrontational: a naked woman crouches and lifts a pencil with her buttocks; huge video images of copulating couples alternate with pictures of a defecating anus and a pair of ciggie-smoking vaginas chatting to each other. If you've seen other Fura shows, the company's habit of assaulting the audience's senses will come as no surprise. Previous stunts have involved pelting punters with chicken innards, drenching them with water or riding vehicles into them. And this time, it's interactive: you can text-message the group during the show, and, according to the hype, every night the sexual fantasies of one audience member are realised on stage.

"No one should come out of our show thinking, 'That was nice'," says director Alex Ollé. Not much danger of that: XXX is about sensory overload. One minute you're smirking at a dildo-waving woman, the next you're cringing at the sight of genital mutilation. But what's the point of such attacking theatre? Dramatist Valentina Carrasco believes: "We are trying to make people face some aspects of their own being, especially sexuality. We bring things out into the open. Normally, people watch pornography in the darkness, alone." She argues that most people have no problem with making public intimate things like monogamous love, "but people don't want to show the stuff that comes from our deepest, hidden desires. When sex is related to love, then everything's OK, but when sex is just sex, there's a problem – it's an aspect of intimacy people don't want to expose." So it's the more animal urges – the desire to shag everything in sight, essentially – that is the raw material of taboo. That may be right: taboo, after all, is the way we police distinctions between what is human (good) and inhuman (bad). But what's so transgressive, these days, about de Sade? "You read de Sade and it's like 'Oh, my God'," she says. "He puts you in front of an extreme situation and makes it apply to you too." The explicit sexual violence of Eugénie's attack on her mother feeds on basic psychological tensions. But if in XXX this scene feels horrendous, the original is even worse.

"In the book, the final scene is quite hard – the mother's pussy is sewn up after she's been raped by a syphilitic valet," says Carrasco. "But why are we so shocked? The mother is just a symbol of the hypocrisy of a moralistic society." Then she adds: "This also touches [on] taboos about our parents' sexuality, which are very deep. Freud understood this urge to kill our parents. And by watching horrible things on stage you can have a catharsis of your own deepest and darkest desires."

But what about the actors realising the fantasies of members of the audience? Carrasco is a bit cagey about that – it all depends on which country Fura is in. In Spain, one man begged to be flagellated; in Germany, some stripped off on stage. And in Britain? She feels the metropolitan Brits might be either too cool or too PC to participate. We will see.

And anyway, the aim of XXX is "not to break taboos for the sake of it, but to confront people with things that they may not like, but which are part of our hidden lives." For example? "The idea of violence in sex – there's a strong connection between pain and sex, which most people ignore or are afraid of. But it's part of human nature."

Of course, Fura – whose orgiastic style hails from the Catalan tradition of firework processions and street theatre – did not invent the confrontational exploration of dark themes. Back in Mrs Campbell's day, theatre critics described the London premiere of Ibsen's Ghosts, with its allusions to syphilis, as "an open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged." An extreme reaction which suggests that when social mores are rigid, it's easy to offend.

By the 1960s, as social change accelerated, the gap between what writers wanted to put on stage and the sensibilities of Middle England grew apace.

Over the years, there have been many examples of "bad behaviour" on the stage as playwrights full-frontally confronted all that could be affronted: Joe Orton's bisexual hi-jinks in Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964) left one critic feeling "as if snakes had been writhing" around his feet, while the portrayal of a lesbian relationship between Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale in Edward Bond's Early Morning (1968) amused as many as it offended.

Peter Brook's pivotal 1964 Theatre of Cruelty season – influenced by Artaud's idea of shocking the senses into awareness – had its share of sexual sadism (a word derived from de Sade). Most memorably, Glenda Jackson (now a Labour MP), stripped off and whipped a client as Christine Keeler, and in another scene, a woman lifted her skirts to reveal a nest of scorpions. Like XXX, the show was interactive: audiences were asked to suggest words to actors so they could improvise.

Theatre censorship, administered by the Lord Chamberlain, tried to protect the public from swearing, nudity and sex acts. The only way of avoiding this censorship, as Brook did, was by declaring that the show was a private club performance. But when censorship was abolished in 1968, the expected flood of filth did not materialise. Instead, titillation – such as Ken Tynan's Oh! Calcutta! sex revue – moved centre stage.

The last time that staged sex provoked a prosecution was in 1980, when Mary Whitehouse unsuccessfully tried to ban Howard Brenton's The Romans in Britain, which featured a homosexual rape scene. Could XXX fall foul of the law? The Clubs and Vice Unit of the Met doesn't anticipate any problems. "We've been contacted about the show," a spokesperson said. "Our officers have watched videos of it and they can't see evidence of any criminal offence." Still, the show will have an 18 certificate and a license from the local authority.

There will also be ample warning signs – a familiar sight during the past 10 years, in which British theatre has witnessed countless shockfests, from the rape and violence of Sarah Kane's Blasted in 1995 to Mark Ravenhill's explicit and disturbing Shopping and Fucking. Other examples of so-called "in-yer-face" theatre include Anthony Neilson's Penetrator, which featured pornography, and the sexual violence of Irvine Welsh's You'll Have Had Your Hole.

Shows of this nature make such an impact, they sometimes blind us to other questions, such as: is the play any good? As veteran critic Milton Shulman pointed out: "Some critics reinforce their reputations as liberal observers by supporting any form of explicit sexual activity on the stage as a dramatic advance."

But William Burdett-Coutts, artistic director of Riverside Studios, which is staging XXX, is adamant that "there is nothing gratuitous about the show. It's an honest piece of theatre and it leaves you thinking at the end. De Sade pushed sexual perversity beyond the limits and the show makes you ask what is reasonable in terms of your own fantasies." He admits: "There were bits I couldn't watch – some of it is pretty frightening, but some of it is pretty funny too...In the end, one is both attracted to the images on stage and repulsed by them – both sides of the magnet." But is Fura really smashing taboos? The daughter's sexual attack on the mother may be an exploration of murky family psychology, but surely it's also an example of de Sade's utter misogyny? No, it's more complicated than that, argues Valentina Carrasco: "Yes, in Philosophy in the Bedroom, women's sexuality depends on men's, but the character of the corrupt Mme Saint-Ange is strong and interesting, so he's not just a macho misogynist."

Burdett-Coutts thinks that "although sex is pervasive in our society ... anything that goes beyond the boundary of what is generally acceptable leaves everyone feeling slightly concerned. The Europeans on the whole are far more open about these things – we're quite restrained here. And it's quite good to question that restraint." Despite all the talking penises, penetration shots and general shocking and fussing, XXX may be less about taboo-breaking and more about the gulf between what Brits are prepared to accept and what the rest of Europe already shrugs off as perfectly normal. As Channel 4's Eurotrash continues to remind us, what frightened the horses yesterday is now high camp.

'XXX': Riverside Studios, London W6 (020 8237 1111), 22 April to 17 May. Aleks Sierz is the author of 'In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today' (www.inyerface-theatre.com)