In Andrew Goffman’s The Accidental Pervert (by TAC at St James), Malcolm Galea gives a bravura performance as a man who has been a porn addict since his boyhood and decides to bare all (pun intended) to theatre audiences.

Galea has been showing Maltese and foreign audiences his mastery of light comedy, the naughtier the better, for some years. A few years back, his original production, Porn the Musical, had a considerable box-office and critical success.

He is, however, a very versatile performer as he showed, for instance, in his 2011 performance of the main role in Ionesco’s Exit the King, a performance I had then described as “memorable”.

In this long and comically smutty monologue he is not, I think, memorable but certainly funny, though most of the audience seemed to find it much more hilarious than I did.

I found the opening scene as excessively vulgar as anything I have ever seen on a stage. Andrew, the main character, has his back to the audience and mimes masturbation with appropriate sounds. A minute later he turns round and exposes his (fake) member to the audience.

Visually, this was the strongest scene of the production, which runs for about an hour. The rest depends largely, though not entirely, on Andrew’s frank descriptions of his development.

He starts out as a boy who spends all his spare time masturbating to his absent father’s well-stocked porn collection, and grows into a horny teenager who fantasises about having sex with Connie, his mother’s house help.

He eventually graduates into a young man who takes sex wherever he can find it, and finds particular satisfaction in a purely sexual relationship with a married woman neglected by her husband.

He has a long lapse from his porn addiction when he falls in love with Maria, whom he marries and with whom he has all the sex he can desire until she has her first child.

The sight of his beautiful daughter now makes Andrew give up his view of females as just sex objects. But his conversion is not total, for he is now experiencing once more a deprivation of sex as his daughter becomes the most important person in his wife’s life. This leads him to, as he describes it, “the most unpleasant act of his life”; a violent sexual assault on a young mother whom he meets in the park.

He is hypocritical enough to describe this sexual encounter as having been prompted by the woman, but gives himself away when he quotes her shouting that he is a pervert.

Extremely vivid without the need of capturing them on film or video

His account of this encounter and an even more graphic depiction of his imaginary experience with Connie are extremely vivid without the need of capturing them on film or video. He describes Connie as violently seducing him, using voice and gesture to depict his mixture of astonishment and joy as he submits to Connie’s onslaught.

Galea’s turning, from time to time, to individual members of the audience to give them confidential titbits of advice or to ask them questions about their sex life (never expecting an answer, of course) is in a more comic mode.

The monologue does not have the harsh unpleasantness of even mild porn, but the opening, and the encounters with Connie and the young mother, see the script and the production sailing very close to the wind.

Members of the audience who may be tempted towards the end to see the monologue as a parable showing one man’s victory over his addiction to porn are advised to wait for the last line to be spoken.

Marc Cabourdin’s direction gives Galea great freedom in dealing with the script and in inciting audience participation. He has also brought into the script a few Maltese references, perhaps to make sure no one thinks that Maltese males are exempt from watching porn and treating women like objects.

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