Porn Play Review – Ambika Mod excels as an academic retreat for porn addiction | stage

‘I“It’s not that deep,” Annie’s friend assures her. Who cares if you watch a lot of extreme porn? But after turning off the light, Annie can’t get through her impromptu sleepover without masturbating to porn on her phone. The friend next to her wakes up and walks out in disgust.

The same scenario has already led to Annie, a 30-year-old academic, breaking up with her partner. Like Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, she was using porn alongside her boyfriend in bed. Fleabag entertained us with her voracious YouPorn habit, but Annie, despite thinking strongly about their argument, is deeply disturbed by her behavior. So does her father when Annie hides out in her old childhood bedroom with her laptop.

It’s often funny, but this bold play by Sofia Çetin-Leuner depicts the addict’s exhausting compulsion, showing how the search for freedom turns into a dark habit. The characters in her earlier play, It Might Not Be So, which also has concern at its core, have a phrase for this kind of insensitivity: “Your tap has been turned off.” In a riveting performance, Ambika Mod manages to make Ani’s isolation and emptiness as poignant as it is unsettling.

Key to the play’s success is the way Chetin Leoner and director Josie Rourke deftly move between the digital and physical worlds to emphasize the seductive instant gratification of the Internet, where, in the words of Bo Burnham, “anything your mind can think of can be found.” Consequently, Annie’s brain is rewired and her restless search for comfort online becomes a constant amidst the stress that comes with professional success and her grief after her mother’s death. She realizes that these things are triggers, but she chooses to hide behind her friend’s sexual revelations instead when discussing her behavior.

As a play about chronic addiction, this story is full of secrets, underscored by Yimei Zhao’s inspired design that transforms the small theater on the top floor of the royal court into a padded den. They are organized in a circular shape, and are usually seen as providing no hiding place, but Annie hides her laptop and other belongings among the folds of the padded floor. The focused, vulva-like design of the space becomes a cocoon softly lit by Mark Henderson as Annie escapes into her rituals of internet porn. But it also resembles a whirlpool, and in the foreground, it is used to evoke Eve gazing at her reflection in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Annie is a Milton scholar, and the drama grapples not only with notions of lost innocence (an alternative meaning of the word “play” in the title) and the sexual politics of the epic poem but also with the question of the separation of art from the author’s behavior. This moral argument is evident in Annie’s distinction between watching violent pornography (“it’s all fake”) and her real-life views on women and the world. The pornography on Annie’s screens is presented in the abstract, highlighting how the footage itself is almost insignificant, offset by the dizzying, distorted ecstasy of Helen Skiera’s score.

The ambitious balance of tragedy, horror, and comedy is best seen in a haunting scene in which Annie’s boyfriend holds the phone to her while she masturbates. It doesn’t quite come up at the gynecology appointment (for which an entire stretcher is extracted from underneath the kit) where her doctor expresses Annie’s shyness.

Will Close, Lizzy Connolly and Asif Khan brilliantly handle the multiple supporting roles between them in a show with carefully defined action direction by Wayne McGregor. The play’s threads are tied together directly through Annie and her father’s climactic speeches in the kind of ending that often feels forced but is largely convincing here. It is a play that confirms that Çetin-Lehner is a clear-eyed but optimistic chronicler of all kinds of relationships, not least with ourselves.