Stanley Townsend has played some
sinister types in his time, but this may well be a personal best. As
“Papa”, he has designed and runs an online virtual-reality site where
sexual and violent abuse of children is not only permitted but more or
less obligatory. Townsend’s achievement, and those of playwright
Jennifer Haley (who won the 2013 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize with this
piece) and director Jeremy Herrin, is to make such a figure and such a
situation understandable if not outright sympathetic. Over barely an
hour and a quarter Haley’s play at first challenges us to think the
unthinkable, then almost seduces us into it.
In this day-after-tomorrow reality, the “real” world has gone to pot
(“I miss the trees,” remarks one character), most dealings are
conducted in “the Nether” and an enforcement agency tries to regulate
those activities by “in-world” standards. But when the online
“children” are avatars of consenting adults, is this not at once an
Orwellian notion of thoughtcrime and a mediaeval doctrine of
essentialism in declaring one particular continuum to be the “proper”
one whose values apply also to all others?
Townsend’s Papa, bearish to the detective interrogating him yet tender
in his virtual incarnation with his young beloved Iris, claims that
what count in his “realm” are not actions, which are free from
consequence, but ongoing relationships. Since the play cannot show us
any of the acts, these relationships are what we see, and they become
persuasive, especially when “in-world” figures grow to be identified
with their avatars and we find ourselves thinking that the drama
simultaneously has five characters and only three. The play works as
far as we give up our own preconceptions about the essential wickedness
of “Internet porn” and must then question both our original position
and our change of mind, however temporary the latter.
Herrin’s production at first looks as if it may have been over-inflated
from the Royal Court’s upstairs studio, until the bare interrogation
room of Es Devlin’s set unfolds to become various parts of Papa’s
online “Hideaway”. Amanda Hale is a remorseless, brittle detective,
David Beames a dignified, intelligent suspect and (on the press night)
Zoe Brough the little girl who is the disconcerting focus of so much
emotional and legal-philosophical attention. Following as it does Tim
Crouch’s
Adler & Gibb in
the main house, this signals an exhilaratingly daring direction
programming for the Court under artistic director Vicky Featherstone.
It is the very best kind of uncomfortable viewing.
Written for the Financial
Times.