Jane Austen's Guide to Pornography + Gorgeous Bastard!

The Sydney Festival and Chinese New Year are not long gone, but the city's summer of festivals is rolling on into one of its last - the Mardi Gras season. The famous Pride Parade up Oxford St brings with it a slew of cultural events, including much theatre, cabaret and art. Jane Austen's Guide to Pornography and Gorgeous Bastard! are Darlinghurst Theatre's contribution to the festival programme - one that proves to be a mixed blessing.

Jane Austen and Gorgeous Bastard! are two separate works, played back to back on the single ticket. Both are from writer-designer-director Steven Dawson and performed by the same cast of four. Despite the naming order, Gorgeous Bastard! is actually presented first. We find ourselves at an elegantly set table for a wedding reception. We meet three guests: the bride's brother Kevin, and two of the groom's friends, Tom and Father Michael. And though their friend Peter is freshly wed to one of the fairer sex, it's apparent all three of the gentlemen have, at some point, given his zipper a good tug.

What follows is much reminiscence from the three about their encounters with him - the feelings they had and the ones they haven't been able to shake. This, however doesn't exactly make for a compelling hour of theatre. It may be an intended farce, but none of the characters manage to blossom into the third dimension and the heavy stereotype of Tom is just sad. Someone is always talking at someone else, but very little happens. The writing is mostly flat, filled with punchy and pithy one-liners that are often haphazardly interchanged or stumbled over. It simply feels like writer Dawson was trying to pack too many of them in and, with he in the role of director too, one gets the feeling it may have benefited from a second pair of eyes.

The play itself is presented as light entertainment, but it does take on some hefty issues - conflation of desire and lifestyle and labels of sexuality among men - but does so half-heartedly. Gorgeous Bastard! was first performed in 1999. It's baffling how, in this time, the work hasn't outgrown its problems.

Happily, things improve very much post-interval. We meet with a frustrated 21st century dramatist with a penchant for pornography (Brett Whittingham). Opposite him is an exasperated Jane Austen (Nathan Butler), growing weary of her romantic sense and polite sensibilities. For him, love is too much of a mystery, while she is too constrained to unleash the fires of passion within. In each other's reverie, they meet and begin to exert their influence. She at her writing desk, he with his laptop, they share ideas which come to life in the space between them - Todd Morgan and Mathew Gelsumini assuming their various characters who fall into progressively more erotic situations.

The concept is remarkably solid and great to watch. It's neat and well written, so comedy happens much more naturally than in the first act and as such it's much funnier. Actor Nathan Butler gives a superb performance as Jane. Austen's incredulous reading of her experimental, explosively graphic yet somehow still prim erotica might be the most smuttily satisfying moment of the whole Mardi Gras season.

It does all stumble a little when some seemingly unnecessary conflict drives the unlikely duo of Jane and Brett apart. It's another issue that, again, feels like it might have been fixed, or at least lessened, by a team of creatives instead of a single man at the show's helm. Jane Austen's Guide to Pornography stands up very well on its own, so it's hard to understand why it was programmed with Gorgeous Bastard!, especially since they're both sprung from Dawson. Mardi Gras is about a diversity of stories and storytellers and this is a missed opportunity for all of Sydney's many talented emerging GLBT playwrights.

Finally, it's important to state that this isn't theatre for the conservative-minded. It's heavy with the warning of coarse language, adult themes and nudity (though said nudity is brief and rather unnecessary - a more cynical reviewer might suggest it was tacked on to get bums on seats). Although the first act is disappointing, the second is worth the price of admission, especially for Jane's metamorphosis into a smut peddler. Because it surely is a truth much more universally acknowledgeable that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a good shag. Adam Moussa