| Exhilarating, Imaginative Serious Theatre |
At the Royal Court |
| Royal Court- Teh Internet Is Serious Business , Royal Court London , September 29, 2014 |
“Teh Internet Is Serious Business” reunites the writer-director-designer team that worked together on 2013’s “I’m with the Band.” On its fifth performance it feels like a creative collaboration at its peak. It is based on one idea of superlative imagination. Where too many a production pushes screens and electrical paraphernalia onto a stage Tim Price’s script- its subject the rise and fall of two connected hacker groups- contains not a single screen or digital flicker. It is theatre; it relishes actors and action; it is the reason a full house hauls itself out on an evening, away from a million digital simulacra.Cyberspace is the subject but it also creates its own context and location, albeit second hand. An articulate commentator is author of an early sour comment, his evidence the very first preview. It is unjust, an act with small grace against which the creators have small defence. The word, and the concept, of “preview” are real things with real meanings. A piece is still a work in progress, making its way to final form by way of its real arbiter, live response from an audience. But then too the first comment is reflective of the production. The authorial presence is unmistakable, but rightly ambivalent and undogmatic. The contrast with the revived “Vertical Hour”- reviewed on this site February 2008- could not be plainer. Tim Price’s cluster of teenage to twenty-something software masters, strung across a geographical landscape from Shetland to Seattle, might be political heroes, or existential venturers or solipsistic narcissists, or just ordinary young people with a craving for a like-minded gang to link into. In fact they are all four, and all at once. Sit down in front of “Teh Internet Is Serious Business” without preparation and it is most likely bewildering. Short naturalistic scenes of the two principal characters, Jake Davis and Mustafa Al-Bassam, are interspersed with a wild succession of athletes, recognisable cultural figures and life-size animals. Designer Chloe Lamford’s three-sided set is comprised of a hundred panels with hidden doors and entries. An opened trapdoor reveals a crooner from the eighties. A chat bot is dressed as Velma from "Scooby Doo". Pirate Bay takes the form of an inflatable plastic palm tree. A six-foot penguin is crucial as is a Willy Wonka and a depressed “Star Wars” storm-trooper. This is the internet- that means a cat is obligatory. This choice of composition is itself a manifestation of information’s ubiquity. A writer for performance does not necessarily need to take an approach of self-explaining documentary. The facts about Davis and Al-Bassam are available, even if it is in the rough form that is the internet’s common substitute for knowledge. “Teh Internet Is Serious Business” attracts a young audience and the real world of Anonymous and LulzSec can be accessed beforehand or in the interval with a few clicks. Director Hamish Pirie’s production has settled down to a two and a half hour whirligig of heightened imagery, linguistic array and taut choreography, the work of David McSeveney. The scene in which the great global payment systems are laid low is ecstatic physical theatre. It is also of its subject, in that it appears to have been conceived largely in visual terms. As with “I’m with the Band” moral enquiry is not its province. That is for another play. The counter-forces are briefly seen as terse state agents. Nor is it ethical enquiry. The protagonists’ greatest fear is to be known. But the ethical grounding of a human being is to enter into commitments. There is an argument to be unknown when a DDoS assault is launched on a government that is preparing to slaughter its own populace. But the second part of entering commitments is its corollary, the risk of comeback. Take away identity and there is no authenticity. Social media, the subject of so much speculative vapour, lacks ethical ground. It can create action but cannot create groupings that endure. In this respect “Teh Internet Is Serious Business” diverges from its subject. It is put into the public sphere, not by jokey pseudonyms but by Lamford, Pirie, Price, Farncombe, Fortune and a dozen others. This is an exhilarating production that earns an ecstatic response from its mainly young audience. It exhilarates because it is theatre, a large company in action, an action that blends movement, word and music into something that is new with the tang of today. And it has the best of justifications for a live event- there is a Grand Canyon of a gap between seriousness and earnestness. “Teh Internet Is Serious Business” is serious indeed, but it is fun. Tim Price made his first appearance on this site seven years ago, his role as a co-author for a musical from the National Youth Theatre of Wales. A playwright’s life is a hazardous, uncertain adventure. In this glorious Indian Summer of 2014 he can lay claim to be among the most exciting voices of theatre from Wales. |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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