The Naked Joke 

A tragi-comic re-imagining of Chekhov’s Three Sisters.

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A large, old house in the Lake District.

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Three out-of-fashion gay performers have travelled to an artistic commune in Cumbria to lick their wounds after failing to come up with a follow up to their Off-Broadway hit ‘Naked Men Telling Jokes’.

There they meet a bunch of weary BBC actors on TV location work.
 

Chekhov’s characters’ motivations for theorising, yearning for the unattainable and ignoring each other, find precise parallels for gay under-employed actors with addiction issues or new age bents and spiritual yearnings; men who love their profession and the idea of success more than each other, and who pontificate about their impact on the future, while remaining childless.

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The play has an urgency especially through some of the characters’ sense of imminent global meltdown and their attitudes to averting the situation, ranging from organic farming to high-speed spiritual evolution.