‘We don’t want to leave people shocked and shaken’: Inside the new video play about violent porn addiction | Ambika Mod

IIn Sophia Chetin’s play Leuner’s Erotica, which has just opened at the Royal Court in London, Annie is a 30-year-old academic on the frontiers of intellectual discovery: she wins awards for her radical revision of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and effortlessly wins the admiration of her teacher and students alike. She is also addicted to violent pornography and masturbates constantly. She can’t stay in a real sexual moment, but she can’t stay in a real-life conversation either—she’s constantly reaching for her phone, watching porn, and masturbating, often in situations that are almost believable but so strangely wrong that reading the play, and watching Annie’s career and relationships deteriorate, is like being trapped in someone’s anxiety dream.

So, this is a very bold choice for the person playing Ani, Ambika Mod. Since starring in 2022’s This Is Going to Hurt, and even more so since last year’s One Day, she’s become known for, as she puts it, “playing very noble characters who die.” Mod has a world of romantic leads at her feet – a beautiful, relatable woman who can tell you the truth of the human heart with one raised eyebrow. She stars in a play whose opening scene has her on all fours over a mirror, in a frenzy of narcissistic delight, whose every action is centered on her body… well, does it sound like a decision she’ll have to wrestle with?

“This is going to make me sound really crazy, but actually no,” says Maude. “My initial thoughts when I read the script were: ‘What a wonderful play, what a great character, what an interesting thing I’ve never seen before’.”

Chetin-Leuner began writing an erotic play eight years ago, when she was on scholarship to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She has a gentle, soft voice and demeanor, which seems almost comical when all you know about her is the snarky dialogue in her play. She says she wanted to write about porn, broadly, because “the Internet has ruined what, at its core, could be a really fascinating exploration of different kinks. When you’re 12, which is the age when kids start watching porn online now, the way the algorithms work is that they might start with one thing, but then they drive more and more violence. By the time people become sexually active, they’ve internalized a lot of what’s shaped their idea of ​​intimacy, their sexual preferences, everything.”

Some details in the play that might seem maddeningly stylized – Annie has to go to the GP because she masturbates so much that she hurts herself – are actually taken from real porn addicts that Cetin Leoner met while in the US. Much has been written about this addiction, but almost all of it through a male lens, while in her research she found that women are more likely than men to view violent pornography (although research on non-consensual violence is low for either gender, according to the most often cited study).

But how on earth do you stage a play like this? Masturbation is a special thing. Across the whole range of possible ways you can depict it — from the grotesque to the erotic — there’s something about turning that particularity on its head, something so confrontational that it amounts to a kind of violence. Josie Rourke, the play’s director, is one of those people you look at and think to yourself, “Okay, I’ve got this,” given her previous work as artistic director at the Donmar Warehouse Theater in London and, before that, at the Bushes. “One of the nice things about being a theater director for two decades is that it’s possible for me to look at a scene very practically and think about how to present it,” she says. “Your brain is thinking: How do we do this?” Using the same bits of technology you use in the question: “How are we going to kill Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet?”

This isn’t Rourke’s first rodeo, which she illustrates with the least showable moments of her career of 24/7 masturbation. In her twenties, she directed the play Loyal Women about the women’s wing of the Ulster Defense Association, in which a person had to be tarred and feathered. “There’s always another question, beyond ‘How do you make it reach a conclusion?’,” she says, “which is: ‘How do you make it eloquent?'” She says. “Even though what happens in the play is very graphic, how do we feel the audience He loves Character, and it’s not like they’re monitoring the character?

From Maude’s point of view, the challenge is part of the point. “Especially as a brown woman, you feel this pull toward gentleness, toward not having sex, toward being a good girl. My personal desire is that I want more chaos in the characters that I play, and in the stories that I tell.”

It still remains in my mind that the masses might revolt. Ten years ago, I covered the scandal at the Royal Opera House, when there was nudity and a rape scene in Guillaume Tell, and the audience booed, and people walked out. Rourke is unfazed by this prospect, in part because the Royal Court is known for pushing boundaries, whether those are those of propriety, taste, or simply the framework of what does and does not belong in the theater. “Some people walked out of the play ‘Look Back in Anger’ (if you forgot the nitty-gritty; the audience audibly gasped at the sight of the ironing board on stage,” Rourke says). “It’s not about being dramatic, it’s about being a theater through which you come to understand what’s going on in the world, which may reach beyond our own experience. “Tough things happen here.”

And really, porn is about more than just the effect of porn: how it flattens, homogenizes, abstracts, and ultimately deconstructs sex, because it removes you from the world and the people who live in it. This is the background, in fact, to other probing questions in the play: about shame and grief; Network and authenticity. God and patriarchy. Milton. Adam and Eve; Addictions and relationships. How different generations bounce off each other.

In fact, part of Annie’s unraveling as an academic isn’t actually because she watches porn all day; This is because she hits the hard edge of one of her Gen Z students’ boundaries by calling rape “sexy.” He argues so she She wasn’t calling it sexy, she was just thinking about whether Milton was, and she did nothing to dampen the exchange. It’s the perfect distillation of the state of millennial femininity. The first generation, who had porn as ubiquitous through their sexual awakening, are policed ​​by the conservatism of their elders, who still view sexual destiny as a male thing, while at the same time, the generation after them is more stringent about consent, abuse, trauma, and warnings. The space in which millennial women can discuss desire is small and full of landmines.

“We’re not blessed with nuance and complexity in any of our discussions,” Maude says. “She, like Annie, is too young to be a Millennial, but too old to be a Millennial, which technically started in 1997, like Annie, but too old to be a Gen Z, which technically started in 1997. It feels very healthy to sit in the vortex of this play, because outside of it, the binaries get stronger and stronger. Porn is so harmful, social media harasses us too.”

Besides tearing up what you can and can’t say, porn play might also upend what you thought about Milton—the classic patriarch, in art and life, a man so violently domineering that his first wife left him because she couldn’t stand the sound of him beating up his students in Latin grammar. Ani claims that in his portrait of Eve, in Paradise Lost, her worship of the serpent is essentially a worship of the phallus—her self-love is inseparable from her sexuality, and the fall is worth it. So the poem not only allows for female desire, but places it in a fundamentally powerful framework. If you look a little closer, Porn Play recasts Milton as a feminist sexual adventurer and philosopher of the retinal.

Was that Zhiten Leoner’s intention? She approaches this obliquely: “I was talking to a lot of recovering sex and porn addicts, and a lot of the talk was about religion.” “They either came from real religious backgrounds, or they found religion as part of their recovery. I didn’t want to make a play about that, but I understood that there was something about the absolute patriarch, God…” I trailed off, thinking the idea ended up somewhere blasphemous from a religious and feminist perspective. “Anyway, that’s where Milton comes in: he has this wonderful quality, where his hair moves under your feet. Is he a proto-feminist or a terrible scoundrel? Maybe both.”

Maud was raised as a Hindu but is not particularly religious now, although she is spiritual. “We decided for Annie that she would have the same background and heritage, but I wanted to be really clear that I didn’t want her major in academia to be in any way related to her religion,” she says. Rourke was raised Roman Catholic, and says this play revealed “a childhood and adolescence spent learning how to worship, how to think about my body. The church needed to sit between me and those thoughts, not just between me and God.”

“I think a lot about original sin,” she continues. “Is there something that we can’t get out of ourselves? That we’re constantly trying to do? It makes immediate sense to people who have gone through this doctrine, and it makes no sense at all to people who haven’t: You’re told that there’s this sin that you carry with you from birth. There’s something that I find very emotional and profound.”

In the end, porn addiction is just addiction: some of the most powerful scenes are the addict’s ugly, tragic loneliness, and the hero’s journey, as Mudd says, is “trying to get Annie to interact with the real world. Trying to get her back to a place where she remembers she was loved. I don’t want to sound really pedestrian, but there’s a lot of research on addiction, and isn’t that always a search for love and connection and intimacy?”

But Annie’s story is much richer than the addict’s journey into the world of healthy, responsible adults. Her simplest instincts intertwine with her most honest moments, and her ugliest moments slide in and out of her noblest. Mod, Rourke, and Chetin-Leuner never sound more alike when they laugh about how many times they’ve been asked to make a female character more “likable.” “No one will ask, ‘Is Macbeth likable enough?’” says Maud. “I can’t believe people still say that about women in stories, but they do.” Rourke says that whenever she hears the word “likable” in a meeting, she says the word “heroic” at the exact same time, “so that word comes over the word ‘likable’.”

“The play is also a poetic space,” Rourke continues. “I don’t want anyone to leave Burn Play feeling shocked and shaken; I want to open up the poetic space within their sense of shame, their own sense of who they are. And for that reason, they have to have a heroic relationship with this character. She’s the heroine of the play.”

An erotic play is being performed at the Royal Court Theater in London December 13.