Porn.Cake

You can have your cake and eat it too with Griffin Theatre Company

First published on 2 Sep 2011. Updated on 15 Jul 2012.

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You know those tin clicking beetles that used to come in showbags or as party favours? They drove your mum crazy with the irritating noise but made you laugh helplessly, as only the simple pleasures of youth can? Porn.Cake remembers them, and it’s not sure when life got more complicated than delighting in funny sounds. Nor when love became a battlefield, or gluten intolerance became a ‘thing’, or cake became a Jamie Oliver trend-piece rather than, you know, delicious cake.

This is a lightly offbeat new play that's all about the way love and sex and food and everything, really, have become a complicated whorl of weapons people use against one another, with a litany of rules and weighted meanings behind them. Through the eyes of two couples in the kind of living room you might remember from your childhood home, Vanessa Bates’ Porn.Cake tries to sort out exactly why we’re all so unfulfilled. And also tries to produce, sample, and destroy as many cakes as possible. (And yes – It’s all real cake!)

Through Ant and Annie (Glenn Hazeldine and Georgina Syms), and Bill and Belle (Josef Ber and Olivia Pigeot), cake is offered, eaten, smeared, tossed, and basically abused in the name of the play's gently knowing sense humor. Mid-life crises, relationship fatigue, social rituals, our increasingly technological lives – it’s all gently sent up in these quick-cut scenes and monologues as these four characters share a slice of cake and try to connect. It’s cleverly structured and it’s funny. It winks and nudges at our 2012 lives, but doesn’t probe too deep. It's all a little bare, but it has heart.

And they’ll give you free cake at the end.

Words by Cassie Tongue |

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