The Surrender

“The man no longer lives in my arse, I live there now. And what a place it is,” says Swiss actress Isabelle Stoffel with a coquettish tilt of the head. She’s not wrong either, as we find out in graphic detail over the course of her hour-long précis of Toni Bentley’s lascivious erotic memoir.  

Bentley, you see, is missing something. Something deep inside of her. Something that neither ballet, nor books, nor religion seem to salve. “Who am I?” she wonders, gazing into a mirror. Ten years, a misaligned marriage and a fortuitous threesome later, she eventually discovers the untold glories of anal sex and, in the metaphorical sense, doesn’t look back.

It’s hard to take The Surrender seriously at times, as Bentley replays her various anal encounters (298 of them, no less) recorded on tape, occasionally breaking off to talk us through biological diagrams and achieving a unification of the conscious and the subconscious through rectal penetration. Who knew?

As she continues to proclaim gnomic observations of the “my arse sucked us into an airless vacuum” variety, the whole thing threatens to descend into parody. But as the self-discovery/sexual awakening mandate wears thin, Stoffel’s wide-eyed earnestness and puppyish enthusiasm prove surprisingly likeable. You believe her. She makes the preposterous exact; funny, even.

If you’ve read Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller or even perennial housewife-troubler EL James, this is a serviceable stroll across some well-trodden terrain that, sadly, given the 50 shades colouring every WHSmith bestseller stand these days, just feels a little familiar.