When was the last time you really missed someone? In a hyper-connected world, the only times we're really out of contact with those we love is when we are on an aeroplane in an operating theatre. Lovers in restaurants no longer stare into each other's eyes; instead, they check Facebook on their phones.
No wonder there is an awkward moment in this latest show from Hannah Jane Walker and Chris Thorpe, whose previous work together includes the sharply entertaining The Oh Fuck Moment, when they separate all of us from our mobiles. The phones lie in a circle together, winking and chirping like baby chicks demanding instant attention from their mothers. The sense of anxiety is heightened when Thorpe jumps on one phone, destroying it.
But this layered and considered mix of everyday poetry, lyrical ramblings and philosophy is no attempt to turn back the clock – although it does ask how different the world would have been had Alexander Fleming used a mobile phone. Heading home one weekend, might he have called a colleague still at the lab and asked her to dispose of those petri dishes he had forgotten on the window sill?
Mostly, though, this is about our personal relationships with each other, and how it is hard to feel real longing for someone when they are never actually absent but always available. It is about the cacophony of constant noise with which we live (brilliantly demonstrated in a Chinese whispers-style game with the audience), the over-sharing of personal details in railway carriages and the bluntness with which death and disaster are announced in text messages.
The ideas may seem obvious, but this show is so cunningly and playfully constructed that it feels like a gift rather than a lecture, and in its dying moments reminds us that the illusion of being connected is not the same as actually connecting with another human being.
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