Isabelle Warrington in Adult Entertainment.

Marylu Coppini’s enthusiasm for Elaine May’s Adult Entertainment leads her to call it “a gem of a play”, a description that to mind it does not deserve.

The play’s concept is a good one and it is often entertaining but it certainly does not deserve to be a two-hour-long play with a pretty long first act in which many scenes are variations on one theme.

May presents us with a group of porn film actors and the brother of a renowned director of porn films, who has just died. The group discuss the merits of this director during a television programme hosted by Heidi the Ho (Kate De Cesare).

The actors – Frosty Moons (Isabel Warrington), Jimbo (Stefan Farrugia) and Vixen (Katherine Brown) – are veterans, and have reached the stage when the sheer mechanical nature of porn films have got too much for them.

Meeting after the TV programme, they talk over the possibility of producing their own porn film, giving the actors some sort of third dimension instead of the two-dimensionality imposed by Hollywood producers. Guy (Stefan Cachia Zammit), who has inherited his brother’s little studio, agrees to write a script for the venture.

Guy, however, cannot come up with a script that satisfies the cast. He agrees to Heidi’s suggestion to invite Jerry (Philip Leone Ganado), her video cameraman, who is a Yale graduate and an intellectual, to be their script-writer and director.

To meet their touching, but absurd, wishes for the film to be also an art film, Jerry takes them on a programme of reading classics and great modern authors, such as Christopher Marlowe, W.B. Yeats and Dylan Thomas, in order to get them thinking about life in some depth.

Much of the first act sees Jerry working away at his actors, trying hard to get them away from the dull mechanics of porn films. When Jimbo collapses during one of their sessions, the project is imperilled and Jerry says he cannot go on with it. He is persuaded to return with difficulty, but warns them that a great art film is the work of years.

The play ends with actors in ancient Greek, white costumes dancing happily around, leaving the audience with the impression that the playwright is warning us not to take the whole business seriously, and rightly so.

Coppini has managed to make the play work fairly successfully in this small theatre, with an audience on three sides. There are times when one is not sure where a particular scene is taking place; doubtless, a revolving, proscenium stage would have made things much easier.

On the other hand the closeness of all the audience to the often scantily-costumed female actors makes the world of porn acting more tangible.

I like Coppini’s idea of having members of the cast sing the author’s lyrics, with music by Louiselle Vassallo (and one track by Paul Abela), during scene changes. Warrington and Farrugia (the latter with a ribald song that would never have got past the censors formerly) are particularly successful.

These two actors are the ones who succeed most in looking and behaving like performers in the porn genre.

Warrington portrays uncultivated tones and gestures, and an inability to make sense of any intellectual comment until she achieves some degree of enlightenment in the course of the play. Coupled with her unattractive, but revealing costume, it reminds us what she is the whole time.

Farrugia is a big, hulking actor who reveals his great educational shortcomings when he is stumped by the name Christopher Marlowe. But he is certainly not a nincompoop. His is a good, solid performance, the psychological weakness of the character coming to a climax in his dramatic act two scene.

Brown’s Vixen longs for the affection so lacking from porn films. Her growing relationship with Jimbo is one of the strongest elements in the plot, but compared to Frosty she is made to sound middle-class.

De Cesare’s Heidi is from a different background, and handles the interaction with viewers in her TV scenes with a confidence that diminishes gradually.

Leone-Ganado’s earnest Jerry is very sure of himself, but not an intellectual snob. Cachia Zammit’s Guy takes some time to develop into a real character, but he comes very well into his own in the second act.