Ambika Mod, star of One Day and This Is Going To Hurt, has been cast as the lead in a new West End show about a woman addicted to violent porn.
The British actor and comedian 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 3 2025.
“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,” Chetin-Leuner said when her work was shortlisted for Soho Theatre’s 2022 Verity Bargate Award. “It’s about a father and daughter trying to be there for each other but struggling to communicate.”
Mod will play a woman struggling to finish her PhD while battling a secret addiction to violent pornography. The play is reportedly informed by studies looking at woman’s porn consumption habits. In his 2017 book Everybody Lies, former 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.
Mod’s breakout role was in the BBC’s adaptation of Adam Kay’s bestselling book, This Is Going To Hurt, in which she played junior trainee doctor Shruti. She was nominated for the Bafta Breakthrough talent scheme for her performance. In 2024 she played Emma Morley in the Netflix adaptation of One Day — a role she says she “nearly turned down” because she didn’t “see women who look like me playing romantic leads” in reference to her Indian heritage.
Rourke is the former artistic director of The Donmar Warehouse, and the director of 2019 film Mary Queen of Scots starring Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie.
Porn Play is one of four new productions announced for the Royal Court Theatre. In addition, there’s The Unbelievers, which stars Spooks actor Nicola Walker as a mother whose son has vanished – and which is written by Nick Payne and directed by Marianne Elliott.
Then there’s 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. It’s been created by Katie Mitchell, Nina Segal and Melanie Wilson in co-production with the National Theatre of Greece.
