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 des...