...And Eat It Too

You're in your thirties, we won't be crass enough to pinpoint whereabouts, but definitely thirties. There's no denying it, kids today and your 15 year old self see you as 'grown up'. Frivolity and youth seem like distant concepts and you've hit the stage where, as porn.cake playwright Vanessa Bates puts it, “You're on the brink, on the chasm, standing with your toes on the edge of the midlife crisis and peering in. The play is very much about things like loneliness and nostalgia, which I think are two sides of the same coin really.”

So what do you do? You try and take hold, to own this discomforting stage in your life. You get a real job, furnish the apartment with something not purchased at Ikea and throw dinner parties. These are grown-up things. Interestingly enough it was during the last of one of these grown-up endeavours – a dinner party – that porn.cake enjoyed an impromptu premiere of sorts. Fitting really, for a play populated by four dissatisfied Gen Xers that flit between smartphones and sugary treats in attempt to fill the void, the chasm of which Bates speaks.

“I do lots of different kinds of writing exercises and I had these monologues, two particular monologues that I had written – along with a whole heap of others – and I looked at them and thought about putting them together: 'What if these two characters were in the same play?'” Bates explains the origins of porn.cake, a script, as she suggests, driven by monologues. “But then it developed from there and it became two men and two women who were all interacting in a particular way. I was really just playing and exploring what that might be and then I went to a dinner party and I brought this script along and I said, 'Let's all read this script, I've just written it!'

“I'm a big fan of taking new plays to dinner parties – and I'm beginning to hear that, actually, I'm not alone in that; a few other playwrights do that too – and I'm for it, I think it's really good. They've got to be people who can read out loud and perhaps have some kind of theatrical sensibility because you just want to hear it at the beginning and gauge what people respond to, so in that sense it's really good.” A slightly more professional reading of the script at the 2010 PlayWriting Australia National Script Workshop helped iron out the kinks before the play debuted last year at Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre, and now it's coming to Griffin under the direction of Shannon Murphy.

And as for that titillating title? “The name was there. People ask me about the name and I'm not meaning to be provocative particularly but it's actually part of a line that one of the characters says and to me it sums up the play, it sums up the themes really well. A lot of what the play is about is searching, searching for meaning and fulfilment when you perceive that you have none. To me, porn dot cake, that duality, you've got a sense of that kind of sex, but a kind of artificial, possibly even paid for, via the internet sex; and then cake, just that kind of sugar, that sense of indulging, but both of the effects are short term, you know?”

porn.cake will be running from Wednesday 20 June until Saturday 14 July at the SBW Stables Theatre.