If she could somehow make a cyber success of the supporting, less magnetic personality from an acclaimed tv drama, she should be able to work further wonders. Proud of her alternative fan site for Martin Freeman’s Watson from Sherlock Holmes, she is headhunted by a local shop to manage their social media account. She compares herself to the moth that emerges at night to obsessively circle a light source, only hers is the blue light emitting from her computer to which she is unhealthily attached. She spouts compelling facts such that the concept of nostalgia used to be considered a disease, and that today’s individual is assaulted by more images in a day than the typical medieval person was in an entire lifetime. Knowing full well the uglier and less tolerant social conditions present in that era, she nevertheless indulges in the fashions and crafts (Pilkington rocks some very groovy patterned clothing). Her flat is an homage to the ephemera of the 70’s, a decade to which she has devoted herself aesthetically in romanticised nostalgia, a refuge from complication. Julia Pilkington as Violet has the wry charismatic edge of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, barely masking a skittish fragility. Shaw manages, with swift brevity, to cover more ground than most plays do over the course of an overextended run time. She lays bare niggling fears of being supplanted and a resultant retreat into a sentimentalised past. In its explorations of the swirling anxieties and discordance surrounding the sudden emergence of functional AI technologies, the piece couldn’t be more immediate and raw, ripped straight from the headlines. What has brought her to this stage comprises the 45-minute length of this terrifically accomplished work by Lola Shaw (shortlisted-and rightly so-for both the BBC Comedy Submissions and the Channel4 4Stories Award). To the blistering strains of Brian Eno’s “Baby’s On Fire”, the audience witnesses a red-lit tableaux of central character Violet engaged in violent acts towards a laptop, a frenzy of smashing & hammering.
0 kommentar(er)
