In Sophia Chetin-Leuner’s Porn Play, which has just opened at London’s Royal Court, Ani is a 30-year-old academic at the frontier of intellectual discovery: she’s winning awards for her radical revision of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, effortlessly earning the admiration of her mentor and her students alike. She’s also addicted to violent pornography and is masturbating constantly. She can’t stay in a real-life sexual moment, but she can’t stay in a real-life conversation, either – constantly reaching for her phone, watching porn and wanking, often in situations just about believable yet so outlandishly wrong that reading the play, and observing Ani’s career and relationships unravel, is like being trapped in someone’s anxiety dream.
So it’s quite a bold choice of role for the person playing Ani, Ambika Mod. Since starring in This Is Going to Hurt in 2022, but even more so since One Day last year, she has become known, in her words, “for playing very noble characters who die”. Mod has the world of romantic leads at her feet – a beautiful, relatable everywoman, who could tell you the truth of the human heart with one raised eyebrow. Starring in a play whose opening scene has her on all fours atop a mirror, in a frenzy of narcissistic delight, whose every action is centred on her body … well, it feels like it must have been a decision to wrestle with?
“This is going to make me sound really crazy,” Mod says, “but actually no. My initial thoughts when I read the script were: ‘What a fucking great play, what a fucking great character, what an interesting thing that I’ve never seen before.’”
Chetin-Leuner started writing Porn Play eight years ago, while she was on a scholarship at Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. She has a sweet, soft voice and demeanour, which seem almost comical when all you know of her is her play’s caustic dialogue. She says she wanted to write about porn, broadly, because “the internet has just ruined what, in essence, could be a really gorgeous exploration of different kinks. When you’re 12, which is the age that children start looking at pornography online now, the way algorithms work is they might start with one thing, but then it pushes more and more violence. By the time people are becoming sexually active, they’ve absorbed so much that it’s shaped their idea of intimacy, their sexual preferences, everything.”
Some of the details in the play that might sound madly embellished – Ani has to go to the GP because she’s masturbated so much that she’s done herself a mischief – are actually drawn from real-life porn addicts Chetin-Leuner interviewed while she was in the US. Plenty has been written about this addiction, but almost all of it through a male lens, while in her research she found that women were much more likely than men to watch violent pornography (though it’s low single digits for either gender to search for non-consensual violence, according to the most often-cited study).
But how on earth do you stage a play like this? Masturbation is such a private thing. Across the whole spectrum of possible ways you could portray it – from grotesque to erotic – there is something about turning that privacy inside out that is so confrontational as to amount to a kind of violence. Josie Rourke, the play’s director, is one of those people who you take one look at and think, “OK, she’s got this”, given her previous work as artistic director at London’s Donmar Warehouse theatre and, before that, the Bush. “One of the nice things about having been a theatre director for a couple of decades is that it’s possible for me to look at a scene very practically, thinking about how it’s going to be delivered,” she says. “Your brain is thinking: ‘How do we do that?’ using exactly the same technical bits that you’d use for, ‘How are we going to kill Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet?’”
This isn’t Rourke’s first rodeo, which she illustrates with even less stageable moments in her career than 24/7 masturbation. In her 20s she directed Loyal Women, a play about the women’s wing of the Ulster Defence Association, in which someone had to be tarred and feathered. “There’s always another question, beyond ‘How do you get it to deliver?’, which is: ‘How do you make it eloquent?’” she says. “Although what occurs in the play is extremely graphic, how do we have the audience feel like the character, and not like they’re observing the character?”
From Mod’s perspective, the challenge is part of the point. “Especially as a brown woman, you feel the push towards meekness, towards sexlessness, towards being a good girl. A personal desire of mine is that I want more mess in the characters I play, in the stories I tell.”
It’s still on my mind that audiences 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, people walked out. Rourke is unperturbed about this prospect, partly because the Royal Court is well known for pushing at boundaries, whether those are of decency, taste or simply the frame of what does and does not belong on stage. “Some people walked out of Look Back in Anger,” Rourke says (if you’ve forgotten the fine details, audience members audibly gasped at the sight of an ironing board on stage). “It’s not about sensationalism, it’s about this being a theatre you come to to understand what is occurring in the world, that may reach beyond our own experience. Tough stuff happens here.”
And truly, Porn Play is about more than the impact of porn: how it flattens, homogenises, abstracts and finally disembodies sex, as it removes you from the world and the people in it. That is a backdrop, really, to other, searching questions in the play: about shame and grief; kink and authenticity; God and the patriarchy; Milton; Adam and Eve; addiction and relationships; how different generations bounce off each other.
Indeed, part of Ani’s unravelling as an academic actually isn’t because she’s watching porn all day; it’s because she hits the hard edge of one of her gen Z student’s boundaries by describing rape as “sexy”. Arguing that she wasn’t calling it sexy, she was considering whether Milton was, does nothing to soften the exchange. It’s a perfect distillation of the condition of millennial womanhood; the first generation to have porn omnipresent through their sexual awakening, they’re policed by the conservatism of their elders, which still sees sexual destiny as a guy thing, while at the same time, the generation beneath them is more militant about consent, abuse, trauma and trigger warnings. The space in which millennial women can discuss desire is vanishingly small, and full of landmines.
“We are not given the grace of nuance and complexity in any of our discussions,” Mod says – born in 1995, she is, like Ani, almost too young to be a millennial, but just too old for gen Z, which technically started in 1997. “It feels so healthy to sit in the swirl of this play, because outside it, binaries are becoming stronger and stronger. In the same way that pornography is very harmful, social media is also fucking us up.”
Besides tearing up what you can and can’t say, Porn Play might also upend what you thought about Milton – classic patriarch, in art and in life, a man so violently domineering that his first wife left him because she couldn’t stand the sound of him beating his students over Latin grammar. Ani argues that in his portrait of Eve, in Paradise Lost, her worship of the serpent is essentially penis worship – her self-love is indivisible from her sexuality, and the fall is worth it. So the poem doesn’t just allow for female desire, it frames it as elementally powerful. If you squint a bit, Porn Play recasts Milton as a feminist sexual adventurer and philosopher of kink.
Was that Chetin-Leuner’s intention? She approaches this obliquely: “I was talking to a lot of recovering sex and porn addicts, and loads of it was about religion,” she says. “They’d either come from really religious backgrounds, or they’d found religion as part of their recovery. I didn’t want to do a play about that, but I understood there’s something about the ultimate patriarch, God …” she tails off, I’m guessing because the thought ends somewhere blasphemous from both a religious and feminist perspective. “Anyway, that’s where Milton came in: he has this great quality, where his poetry shifts beneath your feet. Is he a proto-feminist or a horrible arsehole? Probably both.”
Mod was raised a Hindu but isn’t particularly religious now, though she is spiritual. “We decided for Ani that she would have that same background and heritage, but I wanted to be really clear that I didn’t want her specialism in academia to be in any way tied to her own faith,” she says. Rourke was raised Roman Catholic, and says this play has uncovered “a childhood and teens that were spent being told how to worship, how to think about my body. The church needed to sit in between me and those ideas, not just in between me and God.
“I think a lot about original sin,” she continues. “Is there a thing we can’t get out of ourselves? That we’re continually trying to? It makes immediate sense to people who went through that doctrine, and no sense at all to people who didn’t: you are told that there is this sin that you carry around from birth. There’s something about that that I find so evocative and profound.”
In the end, the porn addiction is just that, an addiction: some of the most powerful scenes are the tragic, ugly loneliness of the addict, and the hero’s journey is, Mod says, “trying to get Ani to interact with the real world. Trying to get her back to a place where she remembered that she was loved. I don’t want to sound really pedestrian, but a lot of research on addiction, isn’t it always a search for love, for connection and intimacy?”
But Ani’s arc is so much richer than an addict’s journey back into the world of healthy, responsible adults. Her basest instincts are interlaced throughout with her most truthful, her ugliest moments slide in and out of her noblest. Mod, Rourke and Chetin-Leuner never sound more similar than when they’re laughing about how many times they’ve been asked to make a female character more “likable”. “No one’s going, ‘Is Macbeth likable enough, though?’” Mod says. Chetin-Leuner “can’t believe people are still saying that about women in stories, but they are”. Rourke says that whenever she hears “likable” in a meeting, she says “heroic” at exactly the same time, “so that word sits above ‘likable’”.
“A play is also a poetic space,” Rourke continues. “I don’t want anybody leaving Porn Play shocked and trembling; I want to open up the poetic space within their own sense of shame, their own sense of who they are. And for that, they have to have a heroic relationship to this character. She’s the hero of the play.”
Porn Play is at the Royal Court theatre, London, to 13 December.
