More About the Language of Love
Genesis
With its over-the-top portrait of a world gone wrong, its enormous cartoon characters with their crazy names, its excessive verbiage and its even more excessive carnality & brutality that More About the Language of Love is not a "realistic" portrait of the pornographic industry. It is a monstrous play, written as a shouted and pained protest against a monstrous change in the world economic order brought about by Reaganomics and, in the author's home country, Thatcherism.
The plays title is an ironic nod to the 1970 Swedish film Mera ur kärlekens språk, one of the first erotic films to gain mainstream cinema release in the West. Mera ur kärlekens språk is a gentle and, considering what came later, fairly non-exploitative depiction of human sexual activity, half-meant to be taken as an education film. JMC's play More About the Language of Love is quite an education as well, in exploitative economics.
Lead character Rex Mundy's name is derived from Rex Mundi (image left) the Cathar name for the Devil, the "king of this world". Mundy the porn producer in the play is a gargantuan figure, consolidating everything nightmarish and negative about neo-liberal economics and the corporate attitudes & policies which govern them. Mundy is willing to exploit anyone and anything in order to turn a buck, and no consideration of the old humanistic values - of care, of community, of sharing, of Art - trouble his mind as he puts his cast and crew through their daily paces. Under Mundy's misrule, human bodies are valued purely for their ability to labour, and they must sell their labour at the cheapest price. When their labour value goes or they in any way threaten the turnover of Mundy's enterprise, they are consigned to the scrap heap or worse. People of no use to Mundy are so much discarded rubbish.
Whilst the play is meant as a nightmare vision of unchecked Capitalistic enterprise, under which flourishes all the old negatives which the 1960s generation of sexual and social revolutionaries sought to challenge (phallocentric power, female exploitation, racism), the play was not without its basis in reality. A few years before writing the play, JMC had read Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace's autobiography Ordeal, an account of the abuse she alledged suffered at the hands of her manager and husband, Chuck Traynor. The characters and stories of Laura Lovejuice and Chuck Powiss in More About the Language of Love owe more than a little to the narrative Lovelace recounts in Ordeal.
But despite such references, More About the Language of Love is best not taken as a play about pornography, a subject about which JMC has no moral imperative. It is a play about the exploitation of labour, taking the form of a terrifying vision. That vision is not without its own dark humour - one of its modes is comedy of excess - and if it works at all, it is on the level of discordant music, Rabelaisian exaggeration, wailed-out blues and the ritual re-enactment of Walpurgisnacht. It is the closest JMC has ever come to a theatrical tribute to his most admired film, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom.
More About the Language of Love forms with The World & his Wife and another, never-performed play Something in the Entertainment World a loose triumvirate, named by JMC The World Trilogy, dealing with contemporary problems through a medieval prism envisioning The World, the Flesh and the Devil.
