For her latest solo endeavour, A Room of His Own, premiering at DE SINGEL at the end of April, Nona Demey Gallagher stages a debate between Andrea Dworkin and Hugh Hefner, among other voices. Not to deliver answers, but to ask what pornography has quietly scripted into our lives. ‘I don’t want to moralise; I want to observe’
You often begin with literary or historical figures. Why does that method suit you?
I like starting from a historical figure. It creates a mirror for today. The topics they addressed back then still echo, maybe more than ever.
I began theatre school at eighteen. You’re asked to play other people before you know who you are. That always felt strange to me. Research became a way to ground myself. I read a lot before entering the rehearsal room: theory, non-fiction, essays. It’s important to me not to just grab things out of the air.
I’m less interested in pornography itself than in its implications
In earlier collective work (with Krapp), we were already engaging with literary sources, such as Mary Shelley and Gothic material. That’s also where my interest in feminist writers began. With Dworkin, I really fell into a rabbit hole. You start with her, and suddenly you’re reading ten other voices around her. That intellectual excavation is part of the practice.
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Why pornography?
Because it’s everywhere, but hardly discussed seriously.
I’m less interested in pornography itself than in its implications. What does it do to us? It has become a sexual script. It tells us how to have sex, how to look at each other, and how to perform gender. But it also seeps into other areas, such as relationships, power, and aesthetics.
When you read Andrea Dworkin, especially her critique that pornography normalises violence, you realise we’re still inside that debate. Maybe even deeper.
Who owns the room? And who decides what happens inside it?
At the same time, I don’t want to be moralistic. That doesn’t interest me. I’m placing different voices side by side. I want to see what happens when those logics collide. Like in <i>After Dark<i> (80s late-night BBC debate series), where the debate simply unfolded, and no one wrapped it up neatly.
Theatre isn’t policymaking. I’m not here to solve the questions on pornography. I’m here to open it.
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Why the masculine twist in the title, borrowed from Virginia Woolf?
It’s a wink.
It refers to queer theorist Paul B. Preciado and his book Pornotopia. Preciado analyses Playboy as an architectural project. Hugh Hefner was described as ‘the first indoor man’, someone who turned the traditionally feminine domestic space into a masculine space.
If Woolf argued that a woman needs a room of her own, Hefner created a bachelor pad empire. A room designed around male pleasure. Around spectacle. The masculine adaptation exposes that reversal. Who owns the room? Who defines what happens inside it?
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The piece's aesthetic is ‘dark rococo’. Why approach pornography indirectly? I didn’t want to put a bed under cold light on stage. That would be too easy. Rococo fascinates me because of its ornament, its excess, and its sweetness. But beneath that sweetness, something is unsettling. Infantilised femininity. The lifted skirt. The decorative distraction.
I’m not here to solve the questions on pornography. I’m here to open it
Pornography today also aestheticises youthfulness and smallness. There’s always concealment and revelation. That tension interests me more than literal representation.
And I want it to be fun, too. Serious, but playful. A bit wild. Theory can dance.
Would you call your work feminist?
Yes. With a footnote.
If feminism means striving for equality, then of course. But the word has been stretched in so many directions that sometimes it obscures more than it clarifies.
What frustrates me is the persistent distrust towards women speaking about sexuality. The mansplaining. The idea that women are too emotional or too prudish to analyse pornography. Meanwhile, we are often the ones being staged as the object.
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I don’t want to push pornography back into taboo. I want to question its normalisation. Why do we accept it as a given? Why do we assume it is automatically empowering?
I won’t give a final answer. That’s not the point. What excites me is when the intellectual universe becomes collective, when research turns into bodies, voices, and friction. When the debate continues outside the theatre.
<div class="editorial-banner"> <div class=“editorial-credits”>@nona.demey.gallagher<br>@desingelartscentre<br></div>
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