Puppy, now showing at King’s Head Theatre presented by champions of new LGBTQ+ writing Relish Theatre, started off life as a ten-minute short.
Now running at 80 minutes and characterised as an outrageous comedy about queerness, feminist porn, protest, the patriarchy and Nick Clegg, it sits uncomfortably as an overstuffed porn industry critique-romcom-political history hybrid.
Curious young bookkeeper Jaz finally gets together with librarian and porn actor Maya at a regular Tuesday evening dogging club event organised by middle-aged Kensington do-gooders Richard and Sue.
When Maya sets up a feminist porn company to get back control of her career, Jaz helps and supports, but mixing business and pleasure doesn’t work for everyone, and as the venture—and Maya—becomes increasingly successful, the pressure takes its toll on the young couple.
When a new Act of Parliament curbs the range of sexual activities available for viewing in online pornography, it is largely interpreted as anti-women on account of its gender bias. For feminist Maya, it is more than discriminatory censorship since it puts her business and the livelihood of her employees at risk, and she unites the club members together to protest.
Westerman’s writing is at times neat and telling, but at its worst this feels like a work-in-progress piece where the ideas need bonding into coherence and the text slapping into order. After 70 minutes covering pegging, rose budding and coprophilia, the idea that Sue enrolled the royal couple to the dogging club at Richard's investiture seems fatuous, and the repeated cartoonishly exaggerated dogging scenes become swiftly prosaically uninteresting.
The landscape has changed a lot since 2014 when Puppy is set which leaves this revival of Naomi Westerman’s play to occupy an oddly out of date habitat and not just because the law was changed just five years later, and again since. Addressing topics such as consent and ethical porn in the absence of manosphere-advocated violence against women, or the spreading of child pornography by algorithm seems strangely wanting.