Ani is a precocious literary scholar specializing in the works of the 17th-century poet John Milton. She’s also a compulsive masturbator, hooked on sadomasochistic online pornography.
In “Porn Play,” a bleak but intelligent new work by Sophia Chetin-Leuner, currently running at the Royal Court Theater in London, these two pursuits are not entirely unconnected. As Ani explains, the doctrine of original sin that Milton evoked in his epic poem “Paradise Lost” has underpinned the policing of female sexuality for centuries. She believes that power and desire are interlinked, and express themselves in kinky fantasies that shouldn’t be stigmatized. But her predilection for porn is putting a strain on her relationships — in ways that are first discomfiting and later shocking.
The debasing effects of online culture on relationships has been a recurring theme on London stages this past year. The musical “Why Am I So Single?” riffed playfully on a collective jadedness about digital dating. Rosamund Pike’s protagonist in “Inter Alia” — one of several new works responding to the online‘“manosphere” — found out, by snooping on his laptop, that her socially withdrawn teenage son was taking solace in misogyny. And in “Romans: A Novel” an insufferable podcast bro was sardonically portrayed as the latest stage in the evolution of male hubris.
A technology that promised to facilitate human connection is producing new pathologies of loneliness, disconnection and dysfunction. This presents a challenge for dramatists, since being terminally online is a largely inward and inert state. But it must eventually find outward expression, and in “Porn Play,” the actress Ambika Modi renders Ani with a furtive abstractedness that hints at repressed shame.
She’s prickly and evasive in dialogue, and her bouts of self-pleasuring have a joyless, mechanical quality that is provocatively alienating. Each time Ani whips out her laptop or smartphone, she effectively shuts out the audience for the next few minutes.
No one is having much fun, least of all Ani’s hapless boyfriend, Liam (Will Close). Feeling increasingly sidelined by her porn habit, he tries to join in, but she is so transfixed by the phone screen that she barely acknowledges him. This scene is wincingly awkward — a sort of cuckolding by proxy — and sets the tone for a series of interactions in which intimacy is foreclosed, creating a solipsistic vacuum.
In several recent productions, digital devices were conduits for the plot, functioning as portals to a hidden layers of feeling or experience — not all that different, perhaps, to stumbling across a personal diary. But in an eye-catching recent revival of Jean Genet’s “The Maids” at the Donmar Warehouse theater that ended last month, the smartphone screen also formed an integral part of the show’s visual fabric. First performed in 1947, Genet’s provocative allegory of class antagonism was repurposed by the Australian director Kip Williams into a withering commentary on social media influencer culture.
Lydia Wilson and Phia Saban played sisters Claire and Solange, live-in housekeepers to the wealthy Madame (Yerin Ha), an amusingly vacuous “it girl” whom they simultaneously worship and detest. As the maids engage in eroticized role-play, wallow in resentment and enact a twisted revenge fantasy against their boss, they intermittently film their antics on a phone, with the footage relayed in real time on the walls of Madame’s opulent apartment.
Far from overshadowing the onstage action, the footage, treated with outsize proportions, lurid colors and grotesque distortions to simulate the visual language of Snapchat and Instagram, complemented the play’s deranged ambience. Together with Marg Horwell’s sumptuous costumes and Rosanna Vize’s elegant flower-strewed set, it made for a dazzling spectacle, all the more impressive in the Donmar’s relatively small, intimate auditorium.
Williams used similar techniques to evoke themes of vanity and moral degeneracy in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” which played on Broadway this past spring. In “The Maids,” he lays bare the unhealthy symbiosis of envy and self-loathing that drives online fandom. Claire and Solange may be downtrodden, but they are also wannabes, and their desperation for validation makes them persuasive avatars for our cultural moment.
As the critic Martin Esslin wrote in his 1961 treatise “The Theater of the Absurd,” Genet’s plays explore “the despair and loneliness of man caught in the hall of mirrors of the human condition, inexorably trapped by an endless progression of images that are merely his own distorted reflection.” Could there be a more prescient summary of today’s doom-scrolling citizen?
For better or worse, the phone screen is increasingly becoming an extension of our consciousness, and its presence onstage will feel less and less like a novelty as time goes by. Someday, it will likely seem like the most natural thing in the world — provided that it is artfully done and serves the drama.
It depends on the material. When digital camerawork is deployed in conventional, naturalistic plays, the results can feel stilted. It is better suited to works that achieve their emotional purchase through symbolism, rather than via the subtleties of character development and narrative. “The Maids,” with its baroque plot and willfully heavy-handed dialogue, is a good example.
Another is “Evita.” Jamie Lloyd’s production of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical provided 2025’s most memorable coup-de-théâtre when Rachel Zegler, in the title role, left the stage to serenade a crowd outside from the London Palladium’s balcony while theatergoers in the auditorium watched her on a screen.
It was a simple but effective gesture, befitting the legend of Eva Perón, the Argentine first lady whose political charisma derived from her ability to commune directly with the masses. It was also a marketing masterstroke as the assembled fans and curious passers-by recorded Ziegler’s performance with their phones and uploaded it to social media. This, too, felt thematically apt — a distinctly 21st-century update on the play’s tale of power and celebrity.
In recent years, the rise of short-form video sharing has occasioned some anxiety in the culture industries, with media outlets and book publishers agonizing over how best to respond. Theater has a certain advantage, because in its essence it is not dissimilar to much of the front-facing video content on social media. TikTok videos, YouTube shorts and Instagram reels are essentially performance pieces — tiny playlets, if you will — and their default register is histrionic.
The video-sharing app and the theater are both dramatic forms — one just happens to be new, the other ancient. The digital world’s a stage. Savvy theater makers can feed off this new ecology and thrive.
The post Our Phones Are Making Us Lonely. There’s Drama in That. appeared first on New York Times.
