Review: Pornography

Written in the wake of the 7/7 attacks for Hamburg’s Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Simon Stephens’s play contains no porn but it is an explicit exploration of solitary lives that make up our society.

Here they include a cockney schoolboy who cultivates a cruel streak; siblings who relieve their isolation through incest; a widow who prefers machines to people.

Sean Holmes’s shadowy, well performed production captures Stephens’s bleak vision of urban life London’s mood just before the attacks. The city had just won the Olympics, Hyde Park was hosting Live 8 and there was the sense that maybe, just maybe, we had got away with invading Iraq. Some hope.

Stephens has this unsatisfying habit of setting his plays in overt political contexts without addressing the politics. In his 2006 play Motortown Danny, a returning soldier tortures a girl after his tour of duty in Basra. But any lesson is obscured by the revelation that Danny was damaged before he went into the army. And here Stephens draws an unpersuasive link between bomber and bombed. We are all are isolated, seems to be the point. Well, yes. But does that mean we are all bombers in the making?