If you spend a lot of your time paddling around cyberspace, Jennifer Haley’s play will make you squirm. More than vaguely reminiscent of The Matrix, it’s a tense vision of a web-crazed near future, in which freedom of expression collides with taboos and censorship impinges on even the most private fantasies.
The internet has turned into the Nether, a virtual world that is packed with sensory delights. Most people seem to feel more alive online than they do amid the drabness of reality.
One of the Nether’s dark zones is the Hideaway, the brainchild of Sims, a successful businessman lent a growling gruffness by Stanley Townsend.
In this lucrative and shady sphere, consenting adults engage in role play, much of it involving a little girl called Iris. Sims acts as a stylish master of ceremonies, but his customers’ games have far from trivial consequences.
Morris, a detective played by Amanda Hale, discovers this "sympathetic community". She tries to dig up the truth about what goes on there, helped by undercover agent Woodnut. She quizzes Sims and also an award-winning science teacher, whose interest in the Hideaway looks fishy.
Her censorious, stiffly robotic manner clashes with Sims’s candour and his libertarian arguments. The conflict between them is provocative, even if a little too dry and schematic.
The chief pleasure of this co-production between the Royal Court and Headlong is Es Devlin’s dazzling design. It captures the Instagrammy slickness of a society hooked on voyeurism, and Sims’s Hideaway is a stunningly realised Victorian idyll.
While Haley poses challenging questions, director Jeremy Herrin can’t prevent some of the exchanges from seeming static, and aspects of the script strain credibility. For instance, the Nether is run with steely professionalism, so it is hard to believe its overseers face such a struggle to outwit Sims, an enthusiast acting alone.
And although recent coverage of Operation Yewtree makes the subject matter topical, the play itself is unsettling rather than truly chilling.
Until August 9 (020 7565 5000, royalcourttheatre.com)
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