The dramatic potential of mobile phones hasn't passed playwrights by.
In Theatre 503's current production of John Donnelly's Songs Of Grace And Redemption, two characters, old friends who have not been in touch since school, meet in a bar after she looks him up on Facebook (and then bites him and turns him into a vampire, of course).
This is the first example, that I've seen anyway, of Facebook being employed as a narrative device in a play. But given the significant role the site plays in many people's social lives and that it provides a plausible, uncontrived means of getting two characters that haven't seen each other for a considerable period of time to meet, I wouldn't be surprised if more writers began incorporating it into their work.
Theatre is often particularly good at reflecting the way technological developments affect the way people communicate. The example that immediately leaps to mind is the scene in Patrick Marber's 1997 play Closer, where one (male) character indulges in a little chatroom sex play with another while assuming the role of a woman. This was done on stage by lowering a large screen, on to which the words the actors were typing would appear. It's one of the most memorable scenes in the play, even more so for the fact that the internet was then for many still a foggy and forbidding thing. Indeed, Marber recalls it dividing the audience. "I would watch the audience and I could just tell that the majority, in fact, had no idea what they were watching. Whereas the younger people in the audience absolutely knew, oh my God they're in a chat room."
More recently, the plot of Stephen Brown's Future Me (another Theatre 503 production) rested on a scene where an incriminating photograph is accidentally forwarded to all the people in the main character's address book (including his girlfriend and father). One of the drama's tensest moments involved a man sitting silently at his laptop, pondering whether to plug in his modem.
Playwrights have also been quick to pick up on the dramatic potential of mobile phones - in Roy Williams latest play, Joe Guy, a crucial piece of information is delivered by text - and there have already been fringe productions that tackle the phenomenon of blogging. And this is how it should be, because this is how we live and writers need to reflect that. Strange, then, that film usually does this kind of thing quite poorly. Hollywood has never quite figured out how to make tapping away at keyboards exciting. Mainstream cinema seemed to take a long time to acknowledge the internet, sniffing around it suspiciously - and maybe a little fearfully - before fobbing us off with The Net or Hackers, movies that bore the thinnest of relationships to (virtual) reality.
Theatre seems far more capable and willing of reflecting the way that technology is continually reshaping the way we live and communicate and to find ways of making these developments work in a dramatic context. In fact, in this regard, theatre feels more relevant and vital than other media.
