“an innovative, disturbing, sharply relevant piece that implicates viewers in the content they watch”
If you’ve ever wondered what being online would look like as a staged performance, then Theatre Témoin are one step ahead – they’ve replicated the internet in this pitch-black comedy devised by the cast (Jonathan Peck, Louise Lee, Esmee Marsh, Yasmine Yagchi) and directed by Ailin Conant. The storylines are constantly disrupted by bite-size, gif-like moments: Peck skips by in a neon green bodysuit. Lee and Marsh wear giant duck-head masks while playing golf. Windows light up at the edges of the stage for sidebar ads. The performers often freeze, rewind, and repeat, as though someone is editing a YouTube video.
While Feed may have brilliantly captured the chaos of the internet, the play is not the total anarchy its aesthetic suggests. This show is highly intentional, skilfully crafted, and very clever about communicating its message, which condemns fake internet activism: the people who vie for followers and fame by generating shallow sympathy (crying emoji) for tragic causes.
The story centres around a news article about a murdered four-year-old Palestinian boy named Nabil. The article goes viral, and its author, Kate, receives an avalanche of new followers. Eager to use her new celebrity for good (or perhaps just high on the attention), Kate becomes an extreme internet activist. Kate’s technology-averse girlfriend Clem watches helplessly as Kate becomes so obsessed with ‘likes’ and ‘views’ that she loses touch with reality.
Meanwhile, beauty vlogger Mia, moved by Kate’s article, posts a heartfelt message about Nabil and the situation in the Middle East. Mia quickly becomes the voice of justice for Nabil, #FeelForNabil. To continue to raise awareness for the plight of Palestinians (or perhaps to keep her spot in the limelight), Mia resorts to increasingly ‘shocking’ stunts for her vlog posts, including cutting her arm and painting her face with blood. Mia and Kate’s stories switch back and forth, sometimes so fast it feels like toggling between tabs.
On set, long blue drain hoses are used to represent ethernet cables. They wrap around the space, and eventually around the characters themselves. At the beginning, there’s a scene involving an argument about foie gras vs. the vegan faux gras. And at the end, when Kate has one of the hoses in her mouth, it’s a shrewd visual metaphor that perhaps we are all overfed content that advertisers (or more ominous sources) use to extract money and data from us.
As both Kate and Mia spiral out of control, the play escalates to a frenetic pace, becoming more and more outrageous and gory in its bid to keep our attention. The ads increase too, triggered by the characters’ words: ‘Pain’ sets off a commercial for Nurofen. ‘Talk’ gives us an ad for ‘TalkTalk’ – an ingenious mimicry of the algorithm for targeted ads.
Feed is an innovative, disturbing, sharply relevant piece that implicates viewers in the content they watch. Theatre Témoin is warning us all to wake up and smell the foie gras.
“Ferguson tells Kirsty’s story with heart and humour, invoking millennial nostalgia by spraying Charlie Red and swigging WKD Blue”
Early 2000s Brentwood: By day, 16-year-old Kirsty and her friends attend a Catholic all-girls school, wearing hideous ‘deck chair’ striped uniforms. By night, they’re in platform heels, push-up bras, and skin-tight dresses, downing cheap pre-drinks and conning their way into clubs. On the surface it seems fairly harmless – they’re young, having fun. But the truth is Kirsty’s friends aren’t that nice, and the boys (or men) she meets aren’t that nice either. Actually, most of the time, Kirsty’s not having very much fun at all.
Essex Girl, written and performed by Maria Ferguson, is a scathing one-woman show that confronts a zeitgeist and incisively articulates the damage absorbed by the girls who lived it. But the performance isn’t overtly angry – Ferguson tells Kirsty’s story with heart and humour, invoking millennial nostalgia by spraying Charlie Red and swigging WKD Blue. Instead, like the microaggressions Kirsty encounters, Ferguson’s feminist criticism is insidious. It appears in seemingly offhanded comments: The girls’ schools all have slut-related nicknames (Sacred Heart = Sacred Tarts). The Campion boys don’t have any nicknames. There’s impressive craft in this execution.
Ferguson is a gifted performer. She uncannily embodies the contradiction of the fag-smoking, liquor-drinking, thong-wearing 16-year-old, who is, inescapably, still a child: naively believing her predators are her friends. She tells rich, authentic stories slashed with sharp observation. She describes a time she and her friends, tottering in heels, waited while a bouncer checked their fake IDs. She says only that he looked the girls over, but her delivery communicates volumes: He knew they were underage, but gauged they were sexy enough to be good for business. What do club-prowling, money-spending men want? The bouncer lets them in as casually as tossing bait into a shark tank.
Although the monologue can meander at times, the genius in Ferguson’s script is the subtlety with which she reveals, through entertaining anecdotes, the way girls are primed for abuse. In a land of tanning beds, heavy makeup, and fake tits, Essex girls learn that the goal is to be desired, and to change themselves to achieve it. Kirsty learns all the words to a song she doesn’t like to impress a guy named Ricky. She rates her value on whether or not Ricky wants her. It never occurs to her to re-evaluate whether she should want him: someone who ignores her most of the time and has Guns N’ Roses bedsheets. Kirsty and her friends have been taught to want men to want them, but nothing about having standards for men who respect them.
Of course the power of Essex Girl is that it isn’t just about Essex. Ferguson’s honest and frank account of a teenage girl’s experience will resonate with women regardless of whether they’re from Brentwood, or even the UK. Through skilled storytelling, Ferguson has percipiently captured the moments of injury – the ones most grown women have forgotten, looking at an array of bruises and wondering where they all came from. A valuable addition to the current feminist dialogue.
