FringeReview UK 2019

Eight Gigabytes of Hardcore Pornography

Orange Tree Theatre with St Mary’s University, Twickenham

Genre: Contemporary, Drama, International, Mainstream Theatre, Short Plays, Theatre

Venue: Orange Tree Theatre Richmond

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

Lonely online voices in pitch-dark trying to sound so hip, with all the xxxs and LOLs in, some heart-rendingly funny and sad, or creepy and cocksure; all drift in over fillets of light in the Orange Tree’s blacked-out space. Porn addiction – with plummy job and accent – meets Queen of Shops: on nurse’s pay. Mismatch.

The Directors’ Festival 2019 is back – the third organized by Orange Tree Theatre with St Mary’s University. So welcome to Australian dramatist Declan Greene’s 2014 Eight Gigabytes of Hardcore Pornography. Which when lit up reveals Matthew Douglas’ well-to-do Man repeating ‘I’m slightly out of your age range’ with one remark that gets an instinctive ‘aah’ from an audience member and thanks from Douglas.

Would it have been so instinctive later on? The Man, forties, chunky but hardly physically repellent blows hot and cold with Cate Hamer’s Woman. They self-describe as ‘stupid and fat and boring’ but they’re not. She’s a compulsively spreeing nurse with a work-shot back whom the Man finds ugly when they finally meet after many silences and desperately accommodating prods from her, splattered with emojis and needy exclamation marks. Well that’s mutual in a squirmy scene of meet-and-laugh-desperately over a menu.

So why do we root for and against over the next 60 minutes? And why does she return home with him? Sexual desperation, common to both, need for tenderness anywhere, ditto; or someone who might just tip the balance against all those debt-collectors? He works in IT Security after all. Doesn’t that have something to do with muscle? All of the above.

Bleak and bleakly-mounted this may be, but both characters deserve sympathy. They’re wincingly close to normal, to all of us. Hamer and Douglas show nakedly just how close.

The Man’s porn addiction can be laughed at only up to a point. There’s an unfulfilling marriage and personal loneliness: work and one hour of masturbation from 1am after his wife’s finally slunk to bed without him, her own TV addiction sated. And he’s not extreme hardcore. His relations to real women though are infected by it. Not sexually, but in that sheer sense of disposability those LOLs and xxxs encourage in anyone meeting online.

Gianluca Lello’s direction works on a story-telling text (increasingly prevalent in plays of this length) that requires stark simplicity and at the end a different nakedness. The simple white cruciform platform is designed as with all these plays by Cory Shipp. It’s lit along and above (in satirically rosy glows on occasion) by Chris McDonnell. Indeed light’s the fundamental scenery here. It’s as clinical as the jobs each of the protagonists inhabit, as well as that inhuman meeting–point, the internet. Sound design by Lex Kosanke either plays to that rosiness with a heavenly chorus or a disruptive half-second tearing noise. Scenes aren’t so much differentiated as torn apart. Like an illusion shredded. The production’s thoroughly Anglicised for this production, with burbs and British barbs inserted.

Much is stacked against the Man. Douglas makes much of wincingly winning ways the Man thinks he can cajole an audience with, whilst eliciting a sneaking pity for his predicament. But a well-paid man whose wife has simply lost interest in him, sprawling in their DINKY lifestyle and watching TV might ask himself why. It’s not a region Greene explores. We can infer the Man’s solicitude has long been perfunctory. Whist both watch endless TV cook programmes there’s also the income to enjoy it. Well until the title rears its head as it were. Awkward thing on a work laptop.

The Man visits the Woman once on their only date, where he promptly voms all over himself and collapses. Not before noting snobbily her taste and less middle-class choices. Even when as here the Man intends to sleep with and sneer at someone at the same time. The Woman, in nurse-role washes his clothe irons and neatly folds them. It’s a touching, frighteningly vulnerable detail the Man narrates. And all he does is leave while she’s at work and blanks her. But he manufactures a shame-filled need to ‘get off the grid’ abandoning his wife, and return with an all-bull-and-no-cock story. The Woman’s furious. Two strands of plot then light the Man in two degrees of nakedness.

The Woman’s had all the sympathy and Hamer’s portrayal of a work and pain-gnarled nurse shouldering beyond her physical capacity borders on horrifying: we know it happens. Hamer twists herself round in contortions of pain as she escapes to a room to straighten what she can of her back as spasms finger up and down it. Relations with her wannabe-princess daughter too come as a shock. Whilst satire infuses Greene’s Man, the Woman elicits nearly all the sympathy storyboarding such as this can elicit.

So Greene stacks against the Woman not only her frantic spending and flips that: her equally frantic staying at work when she’s disabling herself. Yet again there’s her breathtakingly hypocritical reaction when someone else sprees. Her daughter’s charges a present to the Woman.

The Woman’s got another phobia: debt-collectors or robbers, or her husband though reportedly dead from a throat wound in a psychiatric unit. Still she hatches a bizarre set of surrenders to make men leave, drills her children in locking themselves in their bedrooms.

Greene plants his denouement well, but before this there’s a remarkably intimate moment of affirmation followed by a stark reverse.

Hamer and Douglas stack humanity against itself with blistering assurance and vulnerability. It’s a fine piece, skeletal, skidding along silicon into our dark. Most of all within its limits it poses dangerous questions of contemporary loneliness, fuelled by fictive porn, TV or life overheard. Alienation’s been a classic critique of the left. Ennui might be more middle-class. Addiction of all kinds is one displacement; Greene’s excellence here is making that relatable. But it’s the same fleshy terror up against digital fictions of ourselves, the appearance of consumer choice about whether to be human.

Published August 7, 2019August 7, 2019 by Simon Jenner