Pornography

by Mary Jackson (August 2009)

The Times: 

Don’t put on your dirty mac and pant and grunt your way to Kilburn, because Simon Stephens’s play isn’t aimed at the onanistic classes. Rather, it’s an impressionistic portrait of 7/7 London that brings onstage a cross-section of citizens none of whom, bar the suicide bomber himself, is directly affected by that day’s attacks. Indeed, Pornography is the most puzzling title of a play since David Mamet inscrutably named his Hollywood satire Speed-the-Plow.  

The Independent’s Michael Coveney declares: “The title refers to how we might view things, not what they are,” an explanation that provokes a sage nod, but doesn’t enlighten. I suspect the real reason the play is called Pornography is to sell tickets. Stephens had to call it something, and  “Kerboom!” would have been in poor taste.

July piece:

It all depends what “understanding” is on offer. If we are served up the usual cheap fare of “root causes” – “Palestine”, “racism” or most laughably “poverty” – then the play will be thin gruel indeed. But if we see Islam in action and its appeal to the pampered, belligerent youth, with his mediocre mind and inflated sense of entitlement, then there will be much to chew on. Let us not forget that Islam spread at the hands of vicious, vacuous young thugs, fuelled by testosterone and greed. Gangsta rap, rather than Mozart, is the fitting background music for Islam…We must know our enemy and our enemy is human.

:

 

Just an everyday story of metropolitan folk, then.

If that is “the point”, the characters should come to life, and with one exception, they didn’t. This is not the fault of the actors, but of the script. The black secretary was colourless and the quarrel with her boss poorly sketched – and did people still fax in 2005? Of the university lecturer and student Michael Coveney writes: “I is limp.

 

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