"I wanted to write something I’d never seen on stage before"
Ambika Mod has been cast as the lead in a new West End show about a woman addicted to violent porn.
The One Day star will perform in the world premiere of Porn Play.
Written by Sophia Chetin-Leuner and directed by Josie Rourke, it will be on at the Royal Court Theatre between November 6 and December 13, 2025.
Billed as “funny, unsettling and honest”, the theatre production will be on at the Royal Court’s smaller Jerwood Theatre Upstairs.
Sophia Chetin-Leuner said: “Ever since I was a teenager, going to see plays at the Royal Court has shaped my ideals and purpose of who I want to be as a writer, so it’s a terrifying privilege to have Porn Play debuting here.”
Porn Play was shortlisted for Soho Theatre’s Verity Bargate Award in 2022.
Sophia said she began writing it to explore the effects of pornography on women but that it has “evolved into something much more delicate and intricate over the years”.
She explained: “I wrote Porn Play because I wanted to write something I’d never seen on stage before, and I’d never seen a woman masturbate.
“It’s about a father and daughter trying to be there for each other but struggling to communicate.”
Ambika Mod plays a woman who is struggling to finish her PhD while battling a secret addiction to violent pornography.
Porn Play is reportedly informed by studies looking at women’s porn consumption habits.
In his 2017 book Everybody Lies, ex-Google data analyst Seth Isaac Stephens-Davidowitz examined data from PornHub and found that, while men search for more porn than women, women search for extreme content twice as much as their male counterparts.
Porn Play is one of four new productions announced for the Royal Court Theatre.
In addition, there’s The Unbelievers, which stars Spooks actress Nicola Walker as a mother whose son has vanished.
There is also Deaf Republic by sign language poet Zoë McWhinney and the Dead Centre theatre company. The play is based on the work of Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky and imagines a town that wakes up unable to hear after a deaf boy is killed.
Also announced was Cow | Deer, a play with no words, just sound, which will aim to “radically decentre” humans in their relationship to the environment.
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