Deep Throat, Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh

Nostalgia-fest makes mockery of male fantasy

Just one of several hundred pornography-based plays on at the Fringe this year, Simon Garfield's take on the earliest mainstream skin flick eschews titillation. Instead, it follows a structure akin to Garfield's novels, where the narratives of main players are juxtaposed to provide a coherent account of the story.

The play tells the tale of how a $25,000 comedy flic about a woman with her clitoris in her throat outgrossed (sorry) most of Hollywood's 1972 efforts. The tale is well documented, and the play presupposes some knowledge of it. The profits were whisked out of the country by the film's Mafia backers, and its star, the late Linda Lovelace, was trapped in an abusive relationship with her brutish husband/manager Chuck Traynor before escaping and revealing her true story. Her co-star Harry Reems eventually cleaned up after a prodigious career of bonking and boozing.

Though essentially a tragic tale, Garfield's production plays it for laughs, at least until Lovelace's true circumstances are revealed, somewhat hesitantly, at the conclusion.

Reems, a fiery Alex Lowe, tells his story in the form of a stand-up routine, from his youth as an aspiring and starving actor to the halcyon days when he was recognised in the street. Spectacularly, he demonstrates every sexual position he knows, solo.

Katherine Parkinson, wearing roller skates, (à la Heather Graham in Boogie Nights, in case you hadn't picked up the connection), takes all the female parts. At first underused and largely decorative, she comes into her own when called upon to recite Lovelace's obviously ghosted lines, every one of them unmistakably redolent of the masculine fantasy of the insatiable woman.

The show falters at this point. Shying away from the serious issues it has raised surrounding porn, the play refrains from entering into the typical arguments about the objectification of women and the commodification of sexuality, choosing instead to poke fun at its subject. To its users, Garfield seems to be saying, porn is little more than a masturbation tool and not a beacon of freedom of expression. This perspective, though intriguing, neglects the more human aspects of the story.

Yet though it hardly gets deeper than the title, this play is never prurient. Despite his often wobbly accent, Lowe's performance as a man who realises his greatest triumph was always tarnished is touching, while Parkinson is by turns perky and punished. Perhaps this nostalgia-fest should have teamed up with Sing-a-long-a Abba upstairs. Swedish? Now that's the hard stuff.