F**KING MEN: Back and bigger than ever for 2025!

Like many writers before me, I’ve always been fascinated by Schnitzler’s classic play, La Ronde. Ten characters. Ten scenes. Ten dances in and out of bed (or in and out of broom closets. Or saunas. Or wherever.)

Among my favourite adaptations are Michael John LaChiusa’s time-jumping musical Hello Again and David Hare’s scaled-down duet The Blue Room, which was a Broadway hit in part due to star Nicole Kidman’s fleeting moment of nudity. But if an all-male La Ronde existed, I had never heard of it.

One summer while vacationing in the gay mecca of Provincetown, thoughts of La Ronde kept popping into my head. Day by sunny day, I observed the roundelay that we gay dudes do in pursuit of sex, whether that’s on the beach, in the bars or simply strolling down the streets of a town preternaturally brimming with homosexuals. Many of us would hook-up — for better or for worse — with an abandon and frequency that would cause my straight friends’ jaws to drop when I’d tell them about it.

Appropriately, I began writing the play in Provincetown. And I didn’t exactly have to go to the library to do research. Truthfully, I didn’t think anyone would be interested in producing the play, so I thought the hell, I’ll give it an un-producible title. After all, the gay-themed narratives of the day were usually driven by what I call the gay-play trifecta: shame, self-loathing and suffering. But a testosterone-fueled new take on La Ronde seemed to offer a much more appealing — and at the time, radical — gay narrative: men who weren’t ashamed of the sex they were pursuing. In fact, they rather enjoyed it and it became an important part of who they were.

Fucking Men debuted fifteen years ago in a tiny London theatre and, to my happy astonishment, the play ran and ran and spurred myriad other productions. And I’m thrilled that Steve Kunis’ terrific production has returned for a third encore at Waterloo East.

Over the years, much has changed which affects the sex lives of gay men, from the development of more highly effective HIV medications to the introduction of PrEP, which enables sexual freedom not truly seen since the early 1980s. So when producer Adam Roebuck asked if I’d be interested in reviving Fucking Men, I jumped at the chance,albeit with one condition: I wanted to find a young director who could challenge me to refocus the play through a modern lens. He recommended the brilliant Steven Kunis, with whom I have since spent many hours dissecting every issue from generational self-identification (gay? queer?) to the pros and cons of hook-up apps. In my day, we had to put on clothes and go out to a bar to get laid, which apparently renders me a bit of a relic.