On a bare, carpeted stage backed by Seventies-style palm tree print wallpaper, we see two long-term couples of the ‘typical’ inner-city Generation X type – mostly yuppie, vaguely hipster – who are struggling to make peace with where they have ended up. Nobody is especially happy and communication has become a struggle – especially when the menfolk seem more interested in their iPhones than their partners, whom they assure they find attractive, “still”.
Vanessa Bates’ play is a little slow to crank into gear. But when it does, it becomes a finely tuned combination of pathos and farce, and includes one rather exceptional scene of comedic dance complete with a touch of porn and plenty of strobe lighting. Almost every scene features a beautifully decorated sponge cake – indeed perhaps up to 15 cakes will be eaten, thrown, made out with and crumbled into the carpeted stage by the end of the night. The scenes – disjointed conversations between the couples and one standout monologue by Georgina Symes’s Annie, a naturopath on the verge of a breakdown after a rather difficult run-in with a client and a weird relationship to food – is spliced with snippets of TV chefs Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson, further emphasising the curious relationship we have to food, sex and everything that comes between.
The cast are all strong, with Symes a standout. The real pathos of the play however comes from Glenn Hazeldine’s Ant, who by the end of the piece has turned 40, fallen for an internet scam, and split open his tongue in an almost affair, and is wracked with loneliness and a sense of disbelief that this is how his has life turned out.
The sense of occasion that cake brings to birthdays, celebrations, weddings and so forth is subverted in Porn.Cake. Here, cake becomes an emblem of nostalgia, a vice and a vehicle for memory. And in a world where two couples struggle to still talk to each other, cake becomes the celebration rather the event it is intended to commemorate. Marie Antoinette might have been dubiously credited with saying ‘Let them eat cake’, but Porn.Cake does this in a much more effective way.
3 ½ stars out of 5
Porn.Cake
By Vanessa Bates
Presented by Michael Sieders and Griffin Independent
Director: Shannon Murphy
Designer: Justin Nardella
Lighting Designer: Teegan Lee
Sound Designer: Steve Toulmin
Cast: Georgina Symes, Glenn Hazeldine, Olivia Pigeot, Josef Ber
1 hour 25 minutes, no interval
Tickets: $26-$30
SBW Stables Theatre, Kings Cross
June 20 – July 14
