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| Quinten Henderson in Disinhibition at MUST photo: Aleksandr Corke |
Flick, known on Instagram as Flick.Eats, and George, known
on Tumblr as Boyance, are social media influencers. Flick.Eats posts FODMAP
recipes and Boyance is living his best gay life online, but both are lies –
constructions of the kind of personalities that get likes and shares and
re-blogs. When Microsoft releases a new artificial intelligence bot onto
Twitter – Tay, whose followers are #TaysTeam – the world of fake online
personas gets trickier to navigate.
Who are Flick and George, really? Do they even know anymore?
Disinhibition plunges the audience right into the
internet, the opening scene a perfect recreation of a Twitter interaction:
someone posts a photo of their cute dog, lots of other users retweet it and someone
@s the original poster, telling them their dog is prettier than they are. All
social niceties are gone; people will say anything to each other online.
Presented by Monash University Student Theatre (MUST) and directed
with a sure hand and clear intent by Artistic Director Yvonne Virsik,
Christopher Bryant’s latest play (1) is an incisive dissection of the world of
social media and how it affects people’s lives and their views of themselves.
Eleven young performers take on multiple roles, evoking everything from a
Twitter storm, to awkward DMs, to hook-up culture, to the use and over-use of
emojis to make themselves heard.
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| Georgia Kate Bell Photo: Aleksandr Corke |
Theatre and the internet are strange bedfellows; in some
ways, live performance might be the only time people put their phones away –
and critiquing online culture hasn’t easily translated to the stage. Disinhibition
finds a way to create that multi-tabbed, chorus of voices and bombardment of
news I get daily on my phone and laptop as I try to interact with the world.
The play also touches on the dichotomy of a place that both
allows anonymity and encourages people to be themselves. A recent viral tweet
asked “Are you the same person in real life as you are on Twitter?” And, of
course, even if you’re on Twitter as yourself, you’re not always presenting
every mood or every moment, high or low. Christopher Bryant’s work tackles this
head-on, knowing that people aren’t even the same across different socials.
We’re different on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and
Tumbler and in real life. And yet, perhaps, this combination of different facets
of ourselves might hint towards our real personality. Or maybe, with each
reiteration, we get further and further from our true selves.
The ensemble of actors is young, and perfectly placed to
embody a generation who doesn’t know the world without the internet. They are
engaging and awkward and sincere and hilarious and powerful. For every rough
moment, the audience is delivered a sublime interaction that struggles with the
question “Is the internet good for us?”
Bryant doesn’t have an answer, of course. It’s fuck yes and
hell no. And through slivers of conversation and difficult encounters with the
internet famous, somehow there’s a comfort in knowing that we are all in the
same boat – trying to be ourselves online, but never quite making it.
(1) While Disinhibition opened on 28th
September, Bryant had another play open on 29th September at Theatre
Works, titled The Other Place. I struggled with this one. The potentially
interesting parallel stories of female theatre-makers from the 1970s felt too cerebral,
not enough heart. The Other Place is on at Theatre Works until Sept 8th
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