Ambika Mod is to star as an academic addicted to violent pornography in a new play at the Royal Court in London. Mod, best known for her screen performances in One Day and This Is Going to Hurt, will take on her highest profile theatre role to date in Porn Play, written by Sophia Chetin-Leuner and directed by Josie Rourke.
Billed as “funny, unsettling and honest”, it opens in November at the Royal Court’s smaller Jerwood Theatre Upstairs. Chetin-Leuner, whose play This Might Not Be It was set in a mental health unit and staged at the Bush last year, 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.” The play was shortlisted for Soho theatre’s Verity Bargate award in 2022. Chetin-Leuner 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”.
Mod, who studied at the St Albans performing arts school Theatrix, is also an improv and sketch comedian. Last summer she appeared with the comedy troupe the Free Association at the Edinburgh fringe. Her stage productions have included Nassim Soleimanpour’s White Rabbit Red Rabbit, a monologue which performers deliver sight unseen.
Porn Play is one of four new premieres announced by the Royal Court. Deaf Republic, which opens in August, is adapted from the poems of Ukrainian-American author Ilya Kaminsky and will be staged by the company Dead Centre, collaborating with the poet Zoë McWhinney. It will be told through spoken English, sign language, creative captioning and puppetry, using an ensemble of deaf and hearing actors.
That will be followed by a co-production with the National Theatre of Greece entitled Cow | Deer created by Katie Mitchell, Nina Segal and Melanie Wilson. A performance with no words, it will evoke the lives of the eponymous animals and is described by the trio as “an experiment in recalibration … looking beyond the purely human into the more-than-human world”.
Opening in October is a new play by Nick Payne, The Unbelievers, starring Nicola Walker who is currently in the throuple comedy Unicorn in the West End. The Unbelievers will be directed by Marianne Elliott who called it an “honest exploration of motherhood”. The theatre also announced the return of Soleimanpour’s Echo, which had a short run last summer, and a tour for Breach theatre’s Section 28 musical After the Act, previously staged at the New Diorama in London when it was run by David Byrne, who took over at the Royal Court in 2024. It was also announced that Tife Kusoro, whose play G drew acclaim last year, will join the theatre on attachment for 18 months and write a new play.
