Teh Internet, as we all know from everyday experience, is a vast, shapeless, mercurial beast. Fine, but that doesn’t mean that a play about it has to be the same. Tim Price’s play is often smart and always irreverent – look at that very Netty typo in the title – but in the end the material simply refuses to be marshalled either by him or by director Hamish Pirie.
    
Price is interested in the democratising possibilities of the Net, and in particular here he recounts a version of the story of online “hacktivist” collective Anonymous and their more radical splinter LulzSec, who between them took down a number of prominent web sites from the Church of Scientology to the CIA a few years ago, and were instrumental in the Tunisian kick-off to the Arab Spring. Their motivation was a combination of purposefulness and lulz: early on in the play, the rules of this area of cyberspace emphasise that there are no limits and that nothing is off-limits for laughs.
    
Such a bottom-up movement is unprecedented in recent history, and had/has enormous potential to affect the world around it. It would help, then, if the play showed more than a few seconds of that world at a time. One hacker gets pressured in his school class; another is turned by the FBI; each scene is blink-brief, before we return to the online world. Even the cast list provided credits the 15 actors’ Anon handles and the wackily-costumed Internet memes they occasionally represent (yes, Grumpy Cat makes an appearance) before characters IRL (In Real Life). The anything-goes nature of cyberspace here is portrayed as a big playroom, with the orchestra pit turned into a ball-pit and characters emerging through holes in the walls or from trapdoors (when they work… I wonder whether they’ve tried switching them off and then back on again).    
It’s all big fun until you stop to think about or question any part of it, which even the most in-the-moment spectator will surely do within a very short time. After that, it’s like overdosing on a fizzy, sugary drink: lots of bubbles, but you end up fidgety rather than nourished. Fair enough, you’ll probably never again see programming code being danced. But at root the show demands not just appreciable Net-literacy, but partiality to both subject and style, because it’s too busy to win you over. Without those, you’re less likely to give it a Like than to press Ctrl-Alt-Del.
    
Written for the Financial Times.