Modern Living

You might recognise the main characters in Eight Gigabytes Of Hardcore Pornography. Both are middle-aged and a bit desperate. She's a nurse and in a sinkhole of debt; he's in IT and addicted to internet porn. They meet on the internet. They're no good for each other, don't actually particularly like each other, but what's that to get in the way?

Playwright Declan Greene has the sort of sense of humour that can steep us in unlikable characters and an uncomfortable premise and, if the reviews for the Griffin Theatre season in Sydney are to be believed, still create a compelling piece of theatre.

“It's a play that proposes an uncomfortable set of ideas in terms of subject matter and asks some uncomfortable questions of the audience, but I don't think it's actually an uncomfortable experience as a piece of theatre,” insists Greene. “It's very funny, and there's a charm to the storytelling, I think. And it's funny in a way that people recognise at the moment. It's a cringe comedy, like watching a slow car accident happen on stage in the form of two people dating and trying to relate to each other, very painfully recognisable to a lot of people.”

“It's about keeping us conditioned to be in a state of wanting, wishing and dreaming constantly, in the sense that we're taught that our lives should be constantly, unendingly happy, and when that doesn't happen we end up kind of depressed and anxious.”

For Greene, theatre is a site of resistance. “It's about direct communication between living people in a room, and I don't think that can be overstated, really,” continues Greene. “Really, the first thing I think about is how is this a live piece of theatre? What about this demands to be presented in a live fashion?”

For Eight Gigabytes Of Hardcore Pornography, he keeps things direct. “It's also not the kind of play where the actors are just speaking out into a void or whatever,” he explains, “it's really direct communication. Like, [the actors are] standing on stage, looking people in the eye, with the lights on the audience, telling stories for an hour.”

It may seem as though Eight Gigabytes Of Hardcore Pornography has a fairly cynical view of humanity, with all the middle-aged despair that marks the subject matter, but Greene insists that he is gullible enough to really want to believe in the best in people. “And I don't think cynicism and gullibility can coexist,” he says. “I think I kind of engage with what I see around me, especially in terms of the subject matter [the play] addresses. Just in terms of the great gulf you see culturally at the moment, between the way we're conditioned to expect our lives to turn out and what is actually physically possibly for us as human beings to achieve. I think the way consumerism, especially, functions is [that] it's about keeping us conditioned to be in a state of wanting, wishing and dreaming constantly, in the sense that we're taught that our lives should be constantly, unendingly happy, and when that doesn't happen we end up kind of depressed and anxious. So I guess that's what I've come to recognise with this show.”