Playwright's gay sex in the name of art

LONDON (Reuters) - Every night, Tim Fountain lets an audience choose a man for him on the Internet, cycles across town for sex -- then comes back to tell them all about it.

"It runs all month, there are another 22 shags to come or something like that," Fountain said of his popular one-man show, "Sex Addict", at the Edinburgh Festival.

The 36-year-old playwright is pushing back boundaries -- even for the ever more explicit British cultural scene where nudity on stage is old hat and Big Brother has just broadcast its first live sex session, albeit under a tablecloth.

In a show attracting 100 or more people a night at the "The Fringe", Fountain projects a gay chat-room onto a screen, selects candidates with the audience, then lets them vote.

"Then I jump on my 'shag bike', which is electric to get me there quicker. The audience come out to wave me off to the sound of Dame Vera Lynn's 'Wish me Luck as You Wave me Goodbye'."

That is the second half of "Sex Addict".

The first consists of a power-point presentation about Internet sex with plenty of explicit sexual images, and a description of his encounter the previous night.

"If I get a bad shag or no shag it often makes for the better story. No one wants to hear about somebody's great shag," he said in a telephone interview from Edinburgh.

"Last night I got half way there and he called to cancel. He said he was tired. I think he'd probably got a better offer."

"LIKE A BOXER"

Beyond the shock value, Fountain has a serious intention.

"The artistic purpose is to look at the subject of Internet sex, we are the first generation who has ever lived able to access what we want when we want it at speed," he said.

"I wanted to say 'this is what I do, and this is what I suspect an awful lot of you in the audience do. So let's look at it in front of each other'. People can then decide whether this is good or bad, whether I'm sick, sad, liberated or whatever."

Most of Fountain's audience, who pay 10 pounds per person to hear him, are also users of the Internet to seek sex.

Many direct Fountain to their profiles on Web sites. "It must be the first theatre show ever where audience members willingly showing others their naked bodies," he said.

Fountain has built up an interesting profile of Edinburgh.

"I've had everyone from a man with a dungeon in his attic with 500 penises stuck to the roof who worked in the soft furnishing department of a well-known Edinburgh department store, through to a songwriter for children's party songs who wanted me out of the house pretty quick because his boyfriend was a taxi driver who was coming home at 6 a.m.," he said.

Not surprisingly as one of Edinburgh's most outlandish acts this year, "Sex Addict" has drawn heavy media attention and scandalised some who view it as pornographic.

"It's not a show for children. This is just how my life is and how most of my friends' lives are," he said. "I think someone at the Church of Scotland described me as sad and sick."

Fountain -- who estimates he has had sex 5,000 times "on an average of five a week" - is finding the show hard work. "I sleep in the afternoon to save stamina. My director has put me on a regime of no sex between shows, I'm like a boxer," he said.

Does he have a moral message? "There is a price to pay for pleasure. But at the end I'd always go for the hedonism!"