Abstract
In April 2003, the Catalan company La Fura dels Baus brought their production of XXX to London and unleashed a furore in the headlines of Britain’s tabloid press: ‘Art? This is nothing more than porn’ (Daily Mail); ‘Sex on Stage Storm: Raunchiest show ever hits UK’ (Daily Star); ‘XXX: Is this play art or porn?’ (Daily Mirror); ‘XXX-Rated: Anger at hardcore sex act in shock new play’ (The Sun). Clearly, relying on the press releases of the company’s local master publicist Mark Borkowski, combined with interviews with those members of the opening night audience who somehow missed the warning that ‘this production contains extreme and explicit sexual themes and images throughout’, these articles could barely conceal their disappointment that XXX was operating well within the law.1 Furthermore, while its live sex may have appeared real, appearances can be deceptive. Almost every tabloid included the same quotation from Carlos Padrissa, one of the production’s co-directors:
This is not pornography. It is art. The sex in XXX is not real but virtual. It is all theatre. It looks like real sex and the actors are often naked but it is just touching and kissing, there is no penetration …. But our aim is to make it look as if it were real.
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© 2009 Roberta Mock
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Mock, R. (2009). La Fura dels Baus’s XXX: Deviant Textualities and The Formless. In: Broadhurst, S., Machon, J. (eds) Sensualities/Textualities and Technologies. Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230248533_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230248533_11
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