The comments section went on the fritz for a bit, but has now been restored. Hooray. Hooray too for Porn.Cake, the vigorous and entertaining new play from Vanessa Bates.
Porn.Cake, By Vanessa Bates, Malthouse Theatre, 113 Sturt St, Southbank. Until May 8.
Christen O'Leary, Travis McMahon and cake. Photo: Jeff Busby
Porn.Cake is theatre you can really sink your teeth into, and a timely corrective to the moronic caricature of Gen X in Williamson’s Don Parties On. A sex comedy made strange, it’s a mouth-watering confection laced with genuinely biting satire.
Two couples approaching middle-age – Annie (Christen O’Leary) and Ant (Travis McMahon), Bella (Heather Bolton) and Bill (Luke Elliot) – keep meeting in a cake shop. Absurd comedy ensues.
Their interactions are awkward, atomised, game-like and disconsolate. The boys obsessively send amusing texts; the girls gag for their attention. Frustrations foam into furious cake-throwing and cheerless sexual cavorting, with the non-naturalistic mayhem balanced by brilliantly crafted monologues that linger in the air.
Vanessa Bates’ play cunningly dramatises three difficult-to-stage ironies of contemporary life: that the pervasiveness of communication technology leads to social dislocation, that the surfeit of pleasures on offer deranges our appetites, and that we live in what historian Eric Hobsbawm called a ‘permanent present’, where the sense of a public past is so eroded that only the thin wisps of private memory survive collective amnesia.
The Malthouse has delivered an exquisite production, with each element of performance and design plugged smartly into these themes. Christina Smith’s wizardly set is dominated by 54 elaborate cakes tormenting the audience from behind glass display cabinets – a clinical evocation of pleasure – while the glossy floor and plastic chairs play on the architecture of childhood memory and the infantilization of the characters.
Director Pamela Rabe has marshalled a sharp, hybrid performance style that brings the material vigorously to life. Emotionally labile clowning takes in everything from outrageous physical comedy to inexpressible angst; the monologues are crystallized through beautifully detailed naturalistic acting.
Christen O’Leary’s hypocritical naturopath is a scream, but the whole cast shines. These characters might have evolved thumbs, but their tongues have regressed, and the most painful comedy comes from the struggle of people unused to communicating anything worthwhile, trying to do just that.
Funny, disturbing and utterly in tune with the zeitgeist, Porn.Cake is a bold step forward in contemporary theatre.