Pornography (London & Bath)

Simon Stephens’ play Pornography ripples with tension. The title refers to how we might view things, not what they are. We are awaiting the bomb blasts on the tubes and buses four years ago. And we are eavesdropping on the lives of those affected while a terrorist makes his way from Leeds to King’s Cross.

The play, co-produced by the Birmingham Rep, was commissioned and produced by a theatre in Hamburg and seen at the Traverse in Edinburgh during last year’s Fringe festival. It captures the randomness of the horror by showing a cross-section of ordinary lives bumbling towards it.

Sean Holmes’ production is a brilliant exercise in good old Brechtian alienation. Inflamed monologues merge with isolated sound bites. The designer Paul Wills has turned the stage into an extension of a tube train, lights hanging in neon strips, the participatory sound engineer evoking Coldplay’s “Yellow” as an alternative national anthem.

There’s a schoolboy who has problems, including the hots for his teacher. There’s the grown- up female pupil who is drawn back to her male professor (I sensed Stephens trying to re-write David Mamet’s Oleanna while sculpting his text; that’s another play). And there’s the old widowed biddy with strong views – beautifully done by Sheila Reid – and, at the heart of the play, the inquisitive, blooming incestuous relationship of a brother and sister.

The most powerful moment is Kirsty Bushell’s outburst when her sibling, whom she’s exposed as a sexual life-line (Sam Spruell is both bravely naked and eloquent in this role) and thought was dead, walks right in; she’d been waiting for him to ring as London sleep-walked through disaster.

Stephens counterpoints these snapshots with the slow, poetically appreciative progress of a bomber through a countryside he actually loves. It’s not a question of sympathy for the devil; it’s a notion of satirically challenging his motives for destruction.

Anthony Welsh plays this avenger with light empathy – but what’s to like about these people, you may well ask? – while Sarah Solemani and Sam Graham as the academic couple, Frances Ashman as a harassed office worker and the remarkable Billy Seymour as the adolescent pupil, are superbly articulated versions of souls at sea in a cruel world, about to be made even more so. It’s a brilliant piece, strange, hypnotic, unsettling.

- by Michael Coveney