Several years ago, in another lifetime it seems, I played a porn star. In fact I played the Pornstar, in a fairly successful little two-hand play called The Dyke and the Pornstar. The piece gained a deserved reputation for being daring, risqué, even provocative. It was described by one critic as being ‘artfully performed, and sexy as hell’ and it was nominated for something called a UK Freedom Award. (We didn’t win.)
Though it played unashamedly on the tactic of shock and awe, we in the company were often surprised that our appreciative, though often embarrassed, audiences overlooked the underlying theme of the piece — the loneliness and emotional fragility of the outwardly confident Pornstar, suffering the guilt attached to being a sex worker. Such was the general misunderstanding that I was often assumed to be a sex worker myself.
Even people who got the point assumed that I must have had at least some experience in the sex industry. This was illustrated after a Sunday matinée of The Dyke and the Pornstar at the Sydney Mardi Gras festival, when our stage manager arrived in my dressing-room with a note addressed to ‘The Pornstar’. The writer, Sarah, told me that she had never been more moved by any performance she had ever seen and had spent most of the play in tears. She wished to talk to me about it, and enclosed her telephone number.
I rang Sarah. She turned out to be a dominatrix with her own sex establishment in a rundown part of the city (‘We have to keep a low profile, I’ve been raided more than once’). Did I wish to visit and talk more about the play? You bet — you can’t buy that sort of research! I thought.
The following Wednesday, at 3 p.m., I was escorted to Sarah’s office and told to wait. When Sarah arrived she was utterly drenched in sweat. Our first and only meeting was awkward.
‘I’m an actress, too,’ she said. ‘Do you understand?’ Yes, I replied. ‘But of course I don’t get applause.’ No. ‘I’ve never seen anything that addresses how I feel like your play does. How did you do it? Did you interview people, work in a brothel...?’ I made it up, I said, that’s what I do. There was an unbridgeable gap between us. Sarah couldn’t say what she wanted (perhaps needed) to confide in me. Not here, anyway.
Did I want to see the dungeon? she asked. Yes! As we passed the ‘schoolroom’ on the way to the basement a queasy image of the wives, the girlfriends and the children pierced through my mind, only to be dispelled by the need to hold my nerve, to accept my part in this play too.
But nothing could have prepared me for the dungeon itself. It would be impossible to imagine a more sick and sordid place. Its inhumanity filled the senses with despair. It stank of its own filth and depravity — an industrial-sized bin filled with used and fetid condoms prominent, a ‘wet room’ the size of a huge sitting-room. There were racks, chains, an armoury of whips of every size and shape — all spoke of demoralisation, weakness, loathing. It was a very dark, dank, male place, utterly devoid of style, romance, mystery or frisson, never mind light, or life itself. This was a dead place, a place that died every day and every night of its own vileness. This was hell.
Sarah wanted to escape; but she didn’t know how to do it. There was nothing I could do to help. I couldn’t wait to get out, to get up — to the light, to the air, to life itself.
The reality of the sex ‘industry’ is enough to make you sick in heart and soul. Just ask Sarah.