What is the relationship between pain and pleasure? Or trauma and sexuality? These are the questions posed by Sophia Chetin-Leuner’s Porn Play, and they are timely ones for a society tackling the spread of violent pornography. But this production at London’s Royal Court Theatre, staged by the former artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse Josie Rourke, is at its best when it refuses to answer them.
Ambika Mod (One Day) plays Ani, a talented young English lecturer obsessed with Milton and addicted to hardcore pornography. The play weaves both interests together: lectures on Paradise Lost merge into confessions of Ani’s darkest desires. The immersive set, designed by Yimei Zhao, transforms the upstairs theatre into a giant bed with a dip in the middle, which evokes both a 1970s conversation pit and a vulva. Props spring from the bedding as if from Ani’s subconscious. The audience are given shoe coverings before entry and warned about being “close to the action”.
And what action it is. Mod is luminous and feral, masturbating and lecturing on Milton with equal aplomb. Despite the title and premise, the show is modest. Pornographic sounds are made and played but there is no nudity. Instead, it is a profoundly depressing meditation on loss. Ani, haunted by the death of her mother, uses self-gratification as an escape, creating her personal Eden. But, like Eve, temptation punctures paradise, and she is soon dealing with the painful physical consequences of excessive masturbation.
The show deftly skirts moralising about sex: it’s not Ani’s desires that are wrong but rather the isolated way in which she expresses them. Scenes are ordered like a series of vignettes, with Ani navigating disintegrating relationships with her boyfriend, best friend and father, until she has no choice but to accept her addiction in the play’s startling denouement. It’s an unforgettable moment, and one sure to make Chetin-Leuner a star.
Porn Play
Royal Court Thatre, London, SW1
[Further reading: My year-long quest to find London’s best nightclub]
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This article appears in the 20 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Meet the bond vigilantes