In 2022 we reported that 44 Sex Acts In One Week, by Canberra playwright David Finnigan, was shocking the socks off theatregoers at the Seymour Centre during the Sydney Festival in a production by Sheridan Harbridge that featured ear-popping sounds involving fruit, a case, she said, of “less talk, more nibbling”.

Covid caused a pause, but now at long last the show is coming to The Playhouse this week as part of the Valence series, and with a title like that, it’s a fair bet they’ll be packing them in.

Producer-actor Rebecca Massey is taking no chances though, and describes the show to me as “a mashup between high and low art for people who are clever.”

Finnigan is no stranger to Canberra audiences. His one-man show You’re Safe Til 2024: Deep History covering the 75,000-year history of the human being played to audiences at the Canberra Theatre before it went twice to the Edinburgh Fringe, where I caught it in 2022.

But Finnigan was already a well-known Canberra performance poet, raconteur and theatre artist who, with his mates Jack Lloyd and Michael Bailey, ran a successful science-theatre company, Boho Interactive.

Now as part of a “carbon trilogy”, which also includes the prizewinning scripts, Scenes from the Climate Era and Kill Climate Deniers, Finnigan put his mind to that most “natural” of activities, sex, in a sex-com about what drives humanity to go all the way toward its end.

He and the company do not blush to summarise the plot as “Girl meets boy. Girl hates boy. Girl f***s boy 44 times. The world collapses.”

Briefly, journalist Celina is obliged to review a new book, The 44 Sex Acts That Will Change Your Life.

But in order to “road-test” it, she has to experience 44 different kinds of sex by Friday and the only partner available is her sworn enemy, Alab Delusa (say it out loud), an animal activist and the office mail boy.

The four actors don’t show us everything, but they suggest it, with sound effects made through their microphones as they munch and slurp their ways though mangoes, melons etcetera in a take on a classic radio play. In the foyer the audience can buy a “Ruined Orgasm Cocktail” to enhance the effect.

When I catch up with Massey who is in town with her daughter for the Kanga Cup, she tells me that the show started out small, especially during covid. They were limited to having very few people, although since that they have done at the Seymour Centre in Sydney then at the Brisbane Comedy Festival recently.

“Bringing it into The Playhouse is huge, though,” she says.

Massey tells me that Finnigan is these days “a man of mystery”. He’s overseas developing a series of geo-engineering games for the World Bank and scripting an eight-hour stage adaptation of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on the state of the earth’s climate.

She and Harbridge first got together with Finnigan on Kill Climate Deniers.

Of his work, she says: “The ideas are hidden was in a funny, almost ridiculous shell… David is opening up something so enjoyable, so we can to receive a new way looking at the world. That’s what he does. And he never strays too far from the path. I admire him so deeply; we are lucky to have him.”

44 Sex Acts has been written as what they’re all calling an apocalyptic romcom, in which Massey plays a sex coach.

“Celina and Alan have to get it on 44 times… they don’t quite get to the end, because something else happens – but they do fall in love.”

The sound and lighting help the sex acts.

“In my experience as an actor, to have sex on stage is not a very attractive thing unless you want to be funny,” she says. “Fortunately we’re above all of this because of the fruit.” You’ll have to be there to see what she means.

“David believes that humans have strayed from our understanding of ourselves.

“We sense that we are the apex predator but we’re not animals. This is what David has unpacked.

“Sex, death, birth and soccer [she added that one] are what life is all about and David hooks into that very primal place.”

44 Sex Acts in One Week, The Playhouse, July 18-20.