The Brag

Porn.Cake
Until July 14 / SBW Stables
***1/2 

If you’re one of the however many millions of people who tune into Masterchef from week to week, you’ll probably find it quite easy to believe the rallying cry of the characters in Porn.Cake: “Cake is the new porn!” they exhort numerous times over the 70 minutes and mounds of sugary, gluten-y goodness.

Ant, Annie, Bill and Bella are four friends pushing middle age and not particularly happy about the idea. In a series of vignettes, writer Vanessa Bates touches on their waning sex drives, the threat of infidelity, the exasperation of mobile phones, the desperate longing for a return to simpler, happier times. These are characters caught in a web of neuroses and desperately attempting to fight their way out. Cake becomes an escape route, a holy symbol of childhood birthday parties and unadulterated joy.

It’s a cute concept and the characters often seem painfully familiar: Georgia Symes’ Annie, a naturopath, can be found wandering the streets of Rozelle most weekends; Joseph Ber’s Bill is every male Gen-X-er who managed to get stuck in a state of arrested development via a GFC-induced redundancy. It’s slick and sharply executed, with jaunty voiceovers from Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson during the scene transitions providing some excellent double entendres.

But in the end this is more like a wedding cake than a rich ganache: prettily dressed but strangely bland and hollow in the middle. There’s insufficient distinction between the two couples to make much in the way of conflict, and the moments of vulnerability and opportunities for empathy are too few and far between. These are people resigned to their mediocre fates and looking for ways to ease the pain, rather than trying to get rid of the source of their anguish. That might be a realistic depiction of life at 40, but it isn’t a very nourishing one.

Rebecca Saffir