Is this a vulva I see before me? Audiences for Porn Play pant up to the Theatre Upstairs to find a transformed space. Stage and seating are covered in fawn cushions, arranged in a series of concentric circles. All is soft, with secret folds like a body. Spectators peer into an orifice.
Senses are dishevelled before the drama begins. Outside the auditorium shoe protectors, like shower caps, are handed out: what looks like a fetish is a safeguard for those cushions. All bounce slightly off-kilter to their places. And then are bounced by the play.
Sophia Chetin-Leuner’s new drama has a fierce subject: a woman’s addiction to violent pornography. She interviewed dozens of recovering sex and porn addicts and, amazingly, said she found that women are twice as likely to search for violent porn as men. This could easily have felt like an earnest project, with everyone obliged to sit with clenched buttocks. Far from it. It could have become a parody of an avant-garde play – Women Wanking! It did not. It is startlingly agile. While not flinching in front of its hard material, it is also funny. Josie Rourke’s production is ferocious but light on its feet.
Ambika Mod is the lodestar: never offstage, always full on, but contained. In Netflix’s One Day she made complicated acting look unaffected: sullen and earnest, committed and uncertain. She does the same here, playing Ani, a porn-addicted high-achieving academic who specialises in Milton. She begins springy, anxious, acute; she becomes obsessive, her logic disordered and language mangled; she puts herself in danger. Mod is a Marie Kondo among actors, who never makes an unnecessary grimace or gesture, but as she unravels she seems to emit black clouds.
It could have become a parody of an avant-garde play – Women Wanking! It did not. It is startlingly agile
Lecturing on Paradise Lost, Ani reflects on self-reflection: as she cites magnificent lines in which Eve looks at herself in water, not knowing who she is seeing, she slips into a memory of looking into her bathroom mirror – and then into a wild lavatorial fantasy in which she fails to recognise herself. Cosy with her boyfriend, the conversation turns from academic awards to her Pornhub subscription, from his complaint that she wakes him up when she masturbates to videos on her phone, to her accusation that men watching hand-job scenes go uncondemned. Sleeping top to toe with her best friend – “I forgot to tell you Ellie Palmer got herpes!” “Maybe it’ll make her a nicer person” – she causes the friend to quit the bed by undercover duvet work. The violence ratchets up. She damages herself by herself, and invites destruction. “This is so hot,” grins a young man who advances towards her, bike lock in hand, while she is blindfolded on her knees. Two theatre critics who thought themselves inured to stalls shock reach for each other’s hands: I am one of them.
It is a considerable feat to make the extremity of addiction not only plausible but watchable, in a non-glazed way. Chetin-Leuner is greatly helped by Yimei Zhao’s ingenious design, which wraps audience and actors in a single skin – and then frolics with the idea. Characters plunge their hands into seams of the fabric and extract a fork, a laptop or – this takes time – an entire duvet. About to undertake an excruciating internal examination, a nurse laboriously pulls out an examination table and then a long roll of hygienic towel that stretches across the stage.
In a uniformly strong cast, Asif Khan gives a fine, patient performance as a sympathetic, gardening father (there are a few too many Miltonic-biblical references). Will Close cleverly triples up as various chaps, including a boyfriend who is puzzled (why does she need porn when she has got me?), fairly tolerant but also a bit of a, well, dick. Lizzy Connolly switches with wonderful versatility between a student who wants more trigger warnings, a wafting force of nature, and a nurse with a squeaky voice who might have escaped from Abigail’s Party. Wayne McGregor directs the movement: it is entirely to his credit that you cannot see how he has made the action glide.
The script of Porn Play was shortlisted for the Verity Bargate prize in 2022. Aptly. Bargate’s 1978 novel No Mama No was another disturbing feminist fiction (about a woman who dresses her sons as girls). This is early work from 31-year-old Chetin-Leuner: it wears some of its intellectual references too heavily. Yet its dialogue is full of zest and its seriousness real. Arresting enough to make anyone get out from under the duvet and stop watching her mobile phone.
Photograph by Helen Murray