THE CENSOR opens and ends to the Rachmaninov concerto used in the vintage film Brief Encounter but where that was all romance, repression, heartbreak and no sex whatsoever, Anthony Neilson's play presents another very different brief encounter — that between a visionary female pornographer and a male film censor.

And it’s all sex. She wants him to pass her film uncut but he’s constrained by a fictitious film board’s guidelines, as well as his own repressed sexuality. Intermittent images projected onto white muslin show us hazy fragments of flesh but the world on stage is far more real as she attempts to persuade him of the film’s tenderness and communication in graphic scenes of demonstration.
 
The pornographer and censor — brilliantly played by Suzy Whitefield and Jonathan McGarrity in an intense series of tete-a-tetes — are interrupted by out-of-time cameos from the censor’s wife (Chandrika Chevli).

She’s having an affair and trying to get some emotional reaction from her husband. “There are feelings now involved,” she tells him and we know that feelings never came into their marriage. “Sex is as much a mystery to you as happiness is.”