Tease!

So much for the sexual revolution.

Decades after women got the vote, burned their bras for liberty and greeted contraceptives with delight, women’s bodies still remain a battleground.

What we should or shouldn’t wear, what hours are safe enough to venture out in, how far you can rise in the boardroom, or how slutty you are if you invite men to the bedroom.

Sadly, women can be the enemy themselves, too unsure or cowed to seek success or – perhaps more commonly - holding themselves back from pleasure.

It might seem odd that a play set in a hair salon can spark such deep thoughts, and you could dismiss Tease! as a light and comedic piece of fluff. But that would be to waste the considerable work poured into the script and the acting by Tumi Morake and Vanessa Frost.

To be honest, Tease! didn’t seem that important when it first appeared three years ago. But since then perhaps the world has gone backwards.

The play is set in a cash-strapped salon where the co-owner Eva (Vanessa Frost) has hit 40 and her cheating husband wants a divorce. She’s gutted, and by branding her as frigid her husband has instilled a sense of shame that destroys any final modicum of self-confidence. Co-owner Neo (Tumi Morake) is unhappily neglected by a husband who has lost his libido in the quagmire of work and fatherhood.

Soon the ladies are shoring up the business by selling sex toys, which obviously requires deep research and an examination of their own sexual needs and desires.

Frost and Morake co-wrote the script with Jose Domingos, who also directs the show, and it’s a very female-friendly version of sexual exploration. It’s going to attract a predominantly female audience, but men won’t feel out of place or embarrassed by the content, unless the size of the implements makes them squirm.

One funny early scene has the pair getting blotto in a pub and fending off lame chat-up lines from barflies, while the audience groans and laughs at the come-ons. Is this the pathetic level of attention that some women are subjected to? Really?? And of course it is, because women drinking alone in bars are only there to get picked up, right? There’s that battleground again.

The ladies would probably have more money to pay the rent if they didn’t blow it all on tequila, but I digress.

Morake and Frost also play the various clients that visit the salon, swinging into different accents and mannerisms to conjure up the characters. They’ve devised a demographically representative range, like the elderly Muslim woman who still loves a good workout with her hubby, a puritanical young woman who really needs to find her freedom, and a Jewish woman who’ll try anything once, and twice on Sundays.

Three years ago the show felt less solid, and although the script hasn’t changed noticeably, the acting and the atmosphere around us have. Or maybe seeing it a second time reveals more depths. One line that really hits home now is that women are letting women down.

It still takes a little while to warm up, and the rhyming couplets that the bulk of the words arrive in can feel unnecessary. But the actors have settled into their roles with confidence that’s infectious. Their facial expressions are delightful and some of the lines are subtle gems of laughter.

There’s a fluidity to the character shifts too, and the stage set works well with its boring cupboards hiding a Pandora’s box of pulsating plastic.

Sex is never vulgar in these ladies’ hands, and the jokes are witty, not crude. The toys merely serve as props that lead us on a journey with them as Eva belatedly discovers her own sexuality and Neo works to revive her fading marriage. The quick pace and varied emotions carry the audience along, and their gentle, entertaining prods can’t help making you think about your own attitudes to this, that or the other.

Frost says that a huge amount of research lies behind the script, and she doesn’t mean that as an innuendo.

Tease! runs at Sandton’s Auto & General Theatre on the Square until March 21. Tickets from Computicket or from the theatre on 011 883-8606.