Jake Newhouse (Tom Kay) is a “seduction machine”, but Ishtar Madigan (Rebecca Blackstone) would “rather fuck the photocopier”. She’s a feminist scholar who writes about video games; he’s a misogynist podcaster plying pickup techniques to incels under the sobriquet Guy DeWitt. Their lives were entangled when his online followers trolled her. When she tried to fight back she was sued, leaving her penniless and sleeping in her office. The staging underscores the combination of division and connection: Jake’s flat dotted with pizza boxes on one side; Ishtar’s clothing-strewn office on the other.
In Australian writer (and Guardian columnist) Van Badham’s play, banging Denmark is Jake’s goal: he claims he can seduce any woman but he is obsessed with Anne (Maja Simonsen), a Danish librarian immune to his tactics. Who better to help him than a feminist? Plus, he knows Ishtar is desperate for cash, because DeWitt is the very troll who sued her. Thus begins a saga of lust, desperation and morality. It draws in Ishtar’s former student, naive Denyse (Jodie Tyack), who finds herself inexplicably attracted to Jake while stringing along her best friend Toby (James Jip), whose unrequited love leads him to explore the pickup artist world.
Badham originally staged Banging Denmark in 2019. The nauseating rhetoric she channels through Jake recalls 2014’s Gamergate saga, and 2007’s pickup artist manual The Rules of the Game, but still feels disturbingly timely.
Jake is fully formed, slipping from physical confidence to concealed insecurity. Ishtar is afforded complexity too, creating real tension with Jake, but is occasionally so cartoonish it jars with his realism. Anne offers levity with deadpan punchlines. Her librarian’s desk straddles Jake and Ishtar’s worlds, as her scenes straddle reality and fantasy. She starts as an ethereal projection of Jake’s desire, gradually becoming more three-dimensional. It is unsatisfying, then, when she is pushed to extremes that undermine this.
There are cheesy moments – maths expert Toby “running the numbers” on relationships; a thread on the moon – yet there is also rewarding nuance: Badham refusing to let enmity dissolve into lust; both Ishtar and Toby challenging Jake’s binary view of desire; Anne’s seduction technique mirroring Jake’s. It delivers dark laughs while probing desire and entitlement. But as Ishtar says to Jake: “You do not get to have everything you want, just because you want it.”
• At Finborough theatre, London, until 11 May
