There are two alternative interpretations of this mess. The first is that the theatre-making duo RashDash and their textual collaborator Alice Birch found that Internet porn is not a subject which yields any coherent answers, or even coherent questions, and so decided to play up the incoherence and contradictions to distract us from the impossibility of focus. In practice, however, this also distracts from the very subject itself. It is a version of what I have come to think of as the postmodern defence: “Yes, it’s bad, but because we know it’s bad that somehow makes it good.” No, it makes you shysters for foisting such tosh on us in bad faith. The second interpretation is that they believe they actually are saying something about the subject, which is even scarier.

This 75-minute mixture of occasional movement sequences and surreal or hyperreal scenes (giving an accused sex murderer the third degree, petitioning the Queen to outlaw porn, asking that the Internet be turned off) takes as its underlying axiom that pornography is a Very Bad Thing. In fact, at one point it is literally portrayed as the end of civilisation, “and I never use the word literally incorrectly I am a fucking pedant” as Helen Goalen says in the underpunctuated script (although she later uses “refute” to mean “deny”). No case is actually made. Indeed, the main performers periodically break the fourth wall to acknowledge shortcomings such as dealing exclusively with heterosexual porn, as if recognising the fault were sufficient to overcome it. As for the new world that would be possible if free from porn, the most articulate offering is “We need to begin to imagine entirely new landscapes”; Abbi Greenland acknowledges that this is a big ask, but not that it’s meaningless la-la.

Curiously, on press night the laughs (intentionally) elicited began to appear (unintentionally) gendered: some gags seemed female, others male, in terms of the reception they drew. Dealing with such a difference in responses might have led to some interesting content, or indeed to some content. I have surely never seen a show at the National Theatre so utterly, utterly devoid of substance.
 
Written for the Financial Times.