Review: PORN: THE MUSICAL, Theatre503, Tuesday April 13, 2010

Dear me, what a kerfuffle. All sorts of blog debates are being generated over this little musical from Malta, currently resident in Battersea. The Guardian's Michael Billington bemoaned its failure to take its subject seriously and taking a stance on any of its issues; his colleague Sally Stott shared several of his reservations, but singled out its attitude to women as a particular concern.

To be fair to Stott, I had some of the same concerns about the language used about the female characters and discussed them here when I saw the show in Edinburgh last year - and this time round I wasn't especially enamoured by the huge disembodied female legs encircling the audience, nor the female posterior on the show's advertising materials.

However, to look at these issues in isolation is to miss the point. Porn: The Musical isn't solely or even primarily a critique on pornography; it's a standard rom-com narrative displaced into a fiercely anti-romantic setting. Our hero Stefan leaves his widowed mother and sets out for adventure, falls in love with our heroine Sanddy, wins her, loses her, before winning her back again. Along the way, our fatherless protagonist encounters many different ways to be a man before deciding on his own path in life (in fact, this is subverted and echoed in the song Many Ways To Do It, which is about...well, you can work it out, we're all adults here). We have a bad guy, Martin Scoresleazy, the disreputable director; and we have a bad girl ("the only bitch in this goddamn play" as she points out), Jade, Stefan's unfaithful ex-fiancee.

Dr Johnny Long may be a well-endowed porn star and certainly his, ahem, equipment is a focus of his characterisation. Yet he plays the more significant role of confidant and Cupid to both star-cross'd lovers - a sex-obsessed amalgam of Buttons and Dandini, if you will.

And though the show's attitude to women may be stereotypical (slut or victim or both) its attitude to men is similar - the vacuous priapic hunk; the lecherous wheeler-dealer; and of course our naive hero who just wants love. And the idea that men want sex all the time is invoked and gently mocked as Stefan and Dr Johnny share a duet complaining about their lost virility.

Yet the point is that the characters ARE stereotypes, ciphers and cliches, and the show knows it, just as well as it knows all the musical theatre cliches (like Stefan persuading Sanddy to take him back through the power of a ballad).

Porn: The Musical is never going to be to everyone's taste. If you like your humour a little bit puerile, enjoy an innuendo or two and think swearing in a song is amusing, then give it a whirl. If nothing else you'll get to see that fine actor David Burt in an exceptional turn - he plays Martin Scoresleazy, Stefan's mum, and a version of himself (the company's senior actor, berating the audience and the stage crew). If you want a show that spoonfeeds you serious soundbites on the state of the nation and can't be bothered to apply your own analysis to the ideas it offers, then stay away.

Rating: four stars (out of five)

Porn: The Musical plays Theatre503 in Battersea.

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