All Alone

By Gene - 29th Nov 2004

Things are seldom what they seem – especially in the murky, obfuscational world of the internet chatroom. Here you, and your fellow chat chums, can be what you want, tell others what you like and probably never have to live with the consequences. But when the real world and the cyberworld collide the consequences can be horrifically tragic.

Gene David Kirk’s creepy atmospheric new play - part of the commitment to new writing that has recently won the theatre the 2004 Peter Brook Empty Space Award - delves inside the mind of one internet groomer, using two actors to present his real self and the self he portrays to an seemingly unsuspecting schoolgirl while for much of the time her lifeless feet protrude from behind a curtain in his down-at-heel room. Which of the sides we see is real and which an invention is never spelled out even at the startling end of the play.

The writing is robust, inventive and experimental, combining stream of consciousness with real time computer chat and subverted, perverted nursery rhymes. We are presented on the one hand with a sex-obsessed woman-hating loner given to furious masturbation and necrophilia, but also allowed a glimpse at the roots of his own journey to this place of depravity. The section in which he describes how his salivating anticipation of a roast Sunday dinner is instantly dissipated by the return home of his abusive father is wonderfully well drawn, and the gentle, cunning, relentless reeling in of his victim as he adopts the chartroom persona of a fellow pupil shows an impressive facility for dialogue in a play that actually contains none. I won’t give away the climax, suffice it to say it there’s a twist that’s surprising, shocking and thought provoking by turns, and fully justifies the adoption of the nursery rhyme device.

Toby Alexander and Andrew Barron, in their London stage debuts, play the two facets of the Man with great confidence and an admirable lack of physical embarrassment given the amount of self manipulation required, and the disciplined Greta Clough is the “victim”. This work in progress is directed with precision by Theatre 503 Associate Jessica Beck.

One or two sections of the computer chat need a second look and perhaps some pruning in order to fine tune the tempo of the piece, and for my money a greater age differential between the two representations of the Man would add a completely new level to the implications of the piece, but there is no doubt that this is an impressive and highly disturbing piece of work.

Paul Fowler