Guardian | green porno

This article was written for the Guardian

The sickly spoils of Valentine’s Day aside, nature lovers will know the air is already thick with sex. In my bit of London, buds are bulging, swans are thrusting and fox’s pre-coital screams cut through the soupy dusk. Here, the blossom has already started to come. Green Porno was perfectly timed, therefore, on Sunday night. Indeed, it packed out the Southbank’s Queen Elizabeth Hall with insect fans and Isabella Rossellini worshippers alike.

The actress has recently been to university to study the natural world and is now itching to share what she’s discovered. So she has written a book and developed an illustrated lecture about the extraordinary and varied ways creatures find to reproduce. Alone on an empty stage save for a lectern, Rossellini admits that what she’s going to reveal won’t be pornographic but promises it will be obscene. Will it be erotic? That depends on your tastes.

Ranging through the sex lives of snails and spiders, to ducks, dolphins and even barnacles, this is the sort of lecture that dreams are made of. It’s surreal, dirty and meandering. Rossellini delivers what she calls her “conference” with wit and without inhibition, and accompanied by some utterly bonkers and brilliant films. She is both worldly wise and wide-eyed with wonder about her subject. Biodiversity needs champions like this.

Rossellini begins by discussing flowers and the fact us humans proudly give and display bouquets of sex organs. “I’ve seen them in churches” she gasps, with mock disgust. She goes on to describe and illustrate all kinds of copulation in vivid detail, explaining she best understands something if she can get inside the skin of it. As an actress, she must become the praying mantis that is beheaded by his lover or the female spider who is eaten by her offspring. To do this, she sports some fantastical outfits and stars alongside paper puppets in a series of short films.

In one of these films, we see her dressed up as a snail, complete with enormous slimy foot, stuffed inside a shell with her head and anus in dangerously close proximity. She demonstrates that snails are sadomasochists, shooting ‘darts’ at potential mates to turn them on. Later, on stage, she explains how dragonflies have sex, using a pair of winged rubber gloves and a toothbrush as props. The brush is for wiping away anything previous romantic visitors might have left behind. We learn that, relatively speaking, the barnacle boasts the longest penis in the natural world, and that female ducks have labyrinthine vaginas. And that dolphins have exotic uses for their fins and blowholes.

Sex sells of course, as do cult film stars, and this is science at its most silly and overtly adult. But Rossellini’s hilarious appreciation of the natural world and its sexual wonders is infectious. Green Porno has an earthy intellect and can’t be dismissed as merely eccentric. She focuses on the sex stories but doesn’t completely ignore manmade mass extinctions or climate change.

Our engaging lecturer celebrates the fact biodiversity is weird, wonderful and essential. That nature is capable of incredible, eyebrow-raising things. And I can’t think of many things more entertaining than Isabella Rossellini dressed as an earthworm, happily prostrate on a gangplank, convincing Noah why she doesn’t need to board the ark two-by-two because she’s hermaphrodite. Creepy crawlies have a new spokesperson and they really couldn’t wish for a better one. And if you’re looking for a Valentine’s gift for a nature lover with a GSOH, the Green Porno book and films could be perfect.