Porn Play

Ani is a young, successful and award winning academic specialising in Milton’s Paradise Lost, but with a secret addiction to violent pornography.  Ani tells her boyfriend and her friends that is is harmless and not real, but we see the toll it places on her relationships, health and career.  

It’s about addiction and the remorselessness and deviousness of it, but it’s also about grief, and sadness, the dichotomy of pleasure and pain, and uses Milton’s Paradise Lost to consider the nature of shame, guilt and sin. Somewhat unsubtly. the first scene has Ani trying to persuade her boyfriend Liam to eat an apple tart while she makes her arguments that her porn watching isn’t harmful.  It also uses Milton as a basis to take a good bite at misogyny too, both from the men around her but also internalised.  Ani is transgressive too in her sexual desires; she is articulate in rejecting the discrepancies between expectations of men and women, and the policing of female desire, but as she descends further into her addiction, she oversteps more and more boundaries.  I liked that we did discover (in a pretty upsetting scene) that Ani is right that there is a difference between fantasy and reality.  

There is so much else written into this, I thought a great and thoughtful script even if some of the metaphors are a bit obvious. Ambika Mod is excellent at the centre of everything with a incredible performance as a bright, fearless woman struggling with her addiction as it takes over her life.  Whilst there is no nudity or actual pornography in this play, Mod as an actor is pretty fearless too, not just in the multiple masturbation and sex scenes but most powerfully in showing Ani’s gradual loss of control as her addiction spirals. What I haven’t said so far is that it is also very funny, with plenty of comic moments, although the laughter often becomes uncomfortable.   I loved Asif  Khan's performance as Ani’s caring dad, and Lizzy Connolly and Will Close are constantly at work doing an excellent job playing the other characters in all their variety.

This is in the Jerwood Upstairs at the Royal Court, a small space that holds perhaps 100 people, seated in the round, in an amazing padded set.  The centre is circular, spiralling, soft and with secret folds which magically contains all sorts of other props including a laptop, duvets and pillows, and amazingly, a whole medical examination table.  The design references female genitalia, but it also serves as the pool in which Eve sees herself and sometimes becomes a bedroom, a lecture hall, or a room for a sex addiction support group (Ani is evicted as the only woman which is ‘triggering' the the other (male) members.*)

There’s a bit of a faff as an audience member as we all had to wear shoe covers to protect the set - there were plenty of us struggling to get them on whilst perched on the stairs queueing to get into the theatre.  We also had a few minute stop as an audience member was suspected of filming so they took them outside to investigate - they were cleared of the charge and returned to their seat - I think I would have just gone home! 

This is a serious play with a lot to say, and using porn addiction as the conduit for this is inspired.  Recommended.

*One reviewer at Time Out I think missed the point quite spectacularly, objecting to this play being about a woman when this is more of a male problem, missing the critique of misogyny and the explicit calling out of the assumption that it is men who have the problem with sex and pornography, not women.