P*rn Play starring Ambika Mod at the Royal Court – review

Sophia Chetin-Leuner has written a brave play on a difficult subject: pornography. Or to be more specific, the kind of addiction to pornography that can destroy a life just as thoroughly as drugs or alcohol.

It’s a vital theme at a time when porn is available constantly at the touch of a phone screen, when increasingly children encounter it before they have reached puberty, and when it is coming to distort the view of what an intimate relationship can or should be.

Her subject, though, is not a man – still the main consumers – but one of the increasing number of women who are using pornography, often of a violent kind. Her heroine is Ani, a star academic who, when we first meet her, has just won a major prize for her work on Milton’s Paradise Lost.

As played by Ambika Mod, Ani is charming, beautiful, funny, and highly intelligent. But as the opening scene with her boyfriend Liam (one of many parts taken by Will Close) reveals, she has also lost the ability to have sex without looking at porn. At first, the writing cleverly suggests that perhaps it is Liam who is at fault – his wounded pride at her success leading him to attack her bold sexual choices.

But as the play unfolds in a series of short scenes, it becomes clear that Ani’s life is being destroyed by her obsession. The evidence takes multiple forms: an encounter with an anxious student who objects to Ani’s description of Milton making “rape seem sexy”, a sleepover with her friend Jasmine in which she confesses her worries but is unable to stop herself from watching porn on her phone, a troubling encounter with a doctor when she injures herself through excessive masturbation.

Director Josie Rourke and designer Yimei Zhao frame all these encounters in a non-naturalistic way, with Zhao’s set of spiralling steps covered in cream carpet lit by Mark Henderson with circles of light that subtly suggest different moods and moments of public and private life, of real events and of fantasy.

Ani is the only character who is fully developed. Close plays a succession of dismaying men, while Lizzy Connolly takes on the women, and a figure in a floaty dress who seems to embody sexuality itself. Asif Khan is both Ani’s sympathetic father and her dismissive boss.

Rourke’s touch is cleverly light at first, letting the humour seep through a dismaying sense of a life spinning out of control. As the mood saddens, the action seems to slip between the real and the imagined, each blending into one another. The movement – even the scene changes – designed by Rourke and her movement director Wayne McGregor – has a hallucinatory quality. Everything is suggested, nothing shown – until a late terrifying scene where Ani’s pursuit of darkness puts her in danger.

Mod is both committed and wonderfully convincing; as she becomes increasingly unmoored, her desperation to understand her addiction is paralleled by the lectures she gives on Milton, and the way that good and evil, sin and knowledge sit side by side. The play tends to give too much weight to these academic musings and ultimately offers too pat a reason for Ani’s profound unhappiness.

But Mod’s performance, at once engaging, witty and utterly lost, compels attention. Like the play, it engages seriously with a subject that is too often hidden but is altering an entire generation’s understanding of relationships. It’s valuable to begin to bring it into the light.