There is no meaningful line of division between the ‘bad’ pornography and the ‘good’ erotica except subjectivity: all our pornography is simply other people's erotica, their own combination of turn-ons with the awkward bits conveniently muffled, or gone unnoticed. There is nothing like earnest porn to introduce one to the unbridgeable gap between oneself and other people; one becomes immediately aware that people's sexual lives, like their emotional lives, are complicated storage spaces, drawers and cupboards, messy and confusing yet ordered according to peculiar rules. On the other, it is inevitable that many of these erotic systems are socially generated and shared amongst many: hence my sense of confusion, recently, realising that I was watching the unremarkable Puppetry of the Penis with fifteen loud hens' nights.

That Neal Harvey's adaptation can turn Venus in Furs from dated other people's erotica into a lively, shared and felt experience, is an enormous success. The less you know about the original slim novel, and the Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the author who, not unlike de Sade, wrote works of dubious literary value and has had a sexual deviation named after him, the less you lose. Nineteenth-century pornography fed off the normative micro-management of the society of the time, finding salience in subverting details that mean nothing to us, yet upholding restrictions we no longer believe in (just consider that, mere hundred years ago, erotic allure of glimpsing an ankle required and justified the length of the skirt). A literary curiosity, but hardly titillating to the modern reader. In this version, the frills, the petticoats and the painted flowers on the crockery are discarded. What emerges, significantly, is not merely a paired-down, reduced-to-essentials outline of a love story. It also manages to become a manual of desire; an anatomy of romance. The play, executed with great teamwork and harmony by Elbow Room, dives into the emotional complexities of reciprocated love, that most difficult beast of all.

A successful fantasy must remain unfulfilled, just like the only eternal love is unrequited, both preserved by its immutable stability. The impulse to make them real confronts the lover with the confused, illogical order of her sensual cupboard, the nooks and crannies of desire, exposes the strangely shaped holes we are forcefully trying to fill with another person's affection. There is nothing easy, good or comforting about an honest love affair: the thirst to give ourselves according to our rules, to self-annihilate into our chosen silent bliss, present at the epicentre of every romantic haze, crashes against the other person's complexity: their power we give them to control and abuse, their own dreams of comfortable self-annihilation, their own frightening gaps to fill.

The acting is flawless. Angus Grant makes it all seem deceivingly easy: his Severin is reasonably straight-forward, yet confusing, as a man chasing a fantasy. And Karen Roberts walks the tightest rope I have seen on stage in a long time, since some Harold Pinter pieces: her consenting, yet enigmatic Wanda keeps us in total dark about her true thoughts on the eccentric arrangement she enters. Just like we sometimes understand our lover, and sometimes are completely baffled by the same person, Severin and Wanda are in turns transparent and completely opaque.

The play is conducted with a firm, yet gentle hand: a couple of pieces of furniture and immensely subtle lighting make for the 19th-century Europe and its entire sensual map. There are minuscule flaws and inconsistencies: some scenes linger uneconomically, the abstract and the figurative may not always be in agreement, and on two occasions I wished for the soundscape to be a little less jejune. Yet the play is so consistently effective: it makes us laugh, it makes us sympathise, then makes us squirm. On the night that I saw it, the audience seemed to breathe with the actors. One moment we were drawn into believing that we were above all this juvenile nonsense; and in the next moment, the two people on the stage were everyday kind of human, and their desire to shed personal autonomy was no different to that warm centre of every falling in love.

My version of the book is illustrated with Klimt's Judith on the cover. Just like Klimt's habit of painting women nude, then clothing them with paint and golden leaf speaks of a sensual world I cannot relate to, yet his paintings show the familiar murky waters of desire and need, so this play manages to overcome the details of someone else's erotic map to make each one of us question the contents of our intimate drawers.

VENUS IN FURS

Venue: Theatreworks, 14 Acland Street, St Kilda

Dates: 2-18 May

Times: Tues - Sat @ 8.00pm; Sun @ 6.00pm

Tickets: Adults $25, Concession $20

Bookings: (03) 9534 3388, www.theatreworks.org.au