Chris Harder was Porn to Be a Star
28 April 2018

by Drew Rowsome -

Every workplace has a story, usually many, and comedies and one-person shows have long used the plight of the working stiff for raw material. When porn is your profession, there is a lot of material.

Chris Harder's Porn to Be a Star begins with Harder, barely clad, struggling to contort to meet the demands of a photographer trying to push Harder into posed pornographic perfection. The physical comedy escalates until Harder is bent over being urged to deliver a "tish more" pucker and then a "tish tish less." Two of the evening's themes have been established and so has an empathetic bond between the audience and Harder. He is a casually charismatic performer and the stage allows him to offer a much different intimacy than his porn work.

While the intimacy of Buddies' cabaret space Tallulah's is advantageous for displaying Harder's considerable physical assets up close and personal, it also places an equivalent scrutiny on his performance. As well as portraying his charming self - or a calculated acted version of himself - Harder plays as many characters as the loopy plot demands. These dramatis personae range from a bubble-headed attention-whore porn star and a a karaoke-singing just-sprung-from-jail porn star, to a sleazy porn website host and, deserving of her own show, a heartbreaking and hilarious evocation of Harder's mother.

With more quick changes than Miss Ross or Mr Ludlam, Harder skates the edges of caricature to deliver actual heartfelt characters. As he quips early on in Porn to Be a Star, when it comes to being qualified to become a porn star he has, "Two words: theatre school." Harder also draws on his burlesque career to present tangentially connected strip numbers, that demonstrate just why he was named the Best International Male Performer at the World Burlesque Games. Extra points for the glittering ripaway costumes that Harder himself created, stunning creations that he materializes in before slithering or exploding out of.

Entertaining and full of laughs and flesh, Porn to Be a Star is unfortunately less coherent than it could be. Each individual segment is delightful and fresh, but the evening is more sketch comedy cabaret than theatre. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just that the pretense of a plot, involving the competition for the Dirty Dish Awards, is less compellingly precise than the thematic connections dissecting the hunger for celebrity, Barbie and anal bleaching.

Harder is undoubtedly capable of creating and performing a hard-hitting dramatic tour de force one-man show about his experiences in porn, but he appears unable to resist flaunting his thespian muscles and to just entertain and titillate. When the dichotomy fuses, art is achieved. His instructions and demonstration of "the secret to great gay porn acting" is hardcore hilarious, shameless grandstanding, and painfully perceptive. While it is hard to imagine anyone but Harder himself making it work, it would be a surefire theatre school audition piece.

Our complicated relationship to porn is explored, and exploited, but mostly celebrated. Porn to Be a Star is overly ambitious, studded with witty film segments and so many ideas that it can't settle into a solid consistency. But maybe that is the point, our consumption of sexual imagery has been reduced to an industry standard of just long enough to get off, while Harder ably demonstrates that he can hold our attention and burgeoning arousal for as long as he wants to. By the time he has peeled away his personas - and contorted himself for our pleasure - to naked nonchalance, he has generated a money shot of a unique and thrilling kind.