When they talk about the pre-crisis times in Ali Pritchard’s dystopian two-hander, there is no shortage of options for which crisis they mean. It could be Covid-19, global heating or warring superpowers. Whichever it is, capitalism has ploughed voraciously on. Where once the industrial machine was content to profit from our labour, now it is after our very souls.
The play starts, though, with a familiar generational schism. Two women, Julie and Isabel, are squaring up to each other in a claustrophobic space delineated by a simple scaffolding box. Julie is irritated by the time the younger woman spends online. Isabel is outraged to be instructed by someone responsible – by dint of her age – for the decay that has made real life so intolerable. It is less about lacking empathy than mutual incomprehension.
Where Julie wants to escape the digital system, Isabel chooses to escape into it. The difference between our own internet and her virtual world – the Opolis of the title – is one of degree. We can construct online identities, but this one allows anyone who is “ignited” into the system to reconstruct themselves permanently. For a price, they can trade bad memories for good.
It is a scenario not unlike that of Severance, the AppleTV+ series in which employees volunteer to be separated from their domestic identities during work hours. Here, the transitions are more fluid. Kay Greyson, who already has an automaton-like calm as Isabel, takes on an otherworldly air as she absorbs Wikipedia-style data. She spouts out facts on everything from AA Milne to fresh fruit before checking up on her real-time data feed. She has more knowledge than wisdom and perhaps just a touch of existential despair.
Christina Berriman Dawson’s Julie, by contrast, is wedded to old-school ideas such as the possibility of death. She is torn between a maternal exasperation at Isabel’s ignorance and a sense, lurking like a half-expunged memory, that she is in part responsible. As Wilf Stone’s score rumbles disconcertingly, the brief one-acter, written, directed and designed by Pritchard, needles and prods and seems very much a part of our pessimistic age.
Opolis is at Alphabetti theatre, Newcastle, until 7 May.
