Jerker plays a three-week season at Waterloo East Theatre from 26 September, forty years after Robert Chesley wrote it.
Jerker arrives at Waterloo East Theatre for a three-week season from 26 September to 18 October, in a 40th anniversary production of Robert Chesley’s two-hander. Press night is Tuesday 29 September at 7.30pm, and it is the play’s premiere at the venue.
Chesley gave it one of the longer subtitles in the repertoire – The Helping Hand, A Pornographic Elegy with Redeeming Social Value and A Hymn to the Queer Men of San Francisco in Twenty Telephone Calls, Many of them Dirty – and the shape of the play is in that phrase. Two strangers meet through a run of late-night phone calls. Hidden from one another, they trade secrets, fears and longings with nothing but their voices, until an anonymous fantasy turns into something neither of them can quite name.
Written in 1986, at the height of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco, it is a play about how intimacy survives isolation – which is why it has kept finding new audiences.
James Lee plays Bert, making his professional stage debut after training at The BRIT School and recently shooting an independent television pilot in Los Angeles. Paul Dennison plays JR. An East 15 graduate, he spent three years in Osaka playing the Terminator in Universal Studios Japan’s T2 3-D stunt show and originating the role of Franky in the first live-action One Piece productions, and has just finished a third year in the revival of La Bohème at the Royal Opera House. He was crowned Mr Gay England in 2021 and Mr Gay Europe in 2022, and appeared as a member of the Brit Crew in the season premiere of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK.
Henry Adams directs, with Alice Camarota as assistant director and intimacy director, set, costume and lighting design by Waterloo East Theatre, and sound design by Henry Adams and Scott Michaels. It is presented by Adam Roebuck, who produced the UK premiere of Afterglow at Southwark Playhouse and Waterloo East and the UK revival of F**king Men.
Jerker runs at Waterloo East Theatre, Brad Street, London SE1 8TN, with previews from Saturday 26 September and a booking period to Sunday 18 October. Tickets are £40 for premium seats, £32 for middle seats and £25 at the back. The production is for ages 18 and over and contains strong language, descriptive language of a sexual nature and nudity.
