Watching You

Ten years ago, George Mann had a nightmare. While still at university, the co-artistic director of Theatre Ad Infinitum dreamt of a chilling Orwellian future – all eyes in walls and strictly policed thoughts. The unwavering gaze of Big Brother on a terrifying scale.

Today, in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations about the pervasive extent of state surveillance, that bad dream looks closer and closer to reality. It is this discovery of the lengths to which we are routinely surveilled and the astonishing lack of public outcry—“we seem to be sleepwalking towards a society that’s losing its freedoms and liberties”—that has finally provoked Mann to explore that nightmare on stage.

“It felt like the subject matter was extremely urgent right now,” Mann says as he recalls his decision to run with the idea. “It was now or never.”

Mann is not the only theatre-maker at the Fringe this year considering the repercussions of Snowden's revelations. For a number of shows at the Festival, surveillance looms large, either as explicit subject matter or ubiquitous backdrop. There is a question, however, of how well-placed theatre is to address this issue.

“I don’t think there’s all that much that’s interesting to say about that state of surveillance,” says playwright David Leddy, who has used surveillance as frame rather than canvas for his downloadable drama. The narrative of City of the Blind, which Leddy describes as “a downloaded book that comes to life with video and audio and photos.” is instead primarily about a United Nations whistleblower whose superiors are attempting to silence her. Surveillance is introduced through the voicemails and video footage that audiences are presented with, raising the question of where this material has come from.

But Leddy, who describes himself as “very suspicious of political theatre”, has doubts over whether artists have much to add to this debate. “Now that we know the extent of it, I’m not really sure how one could artistically comment on that other than making quite a simplistic piece that says ‘Wow, it’s really bad that we’ve got no privacy any more, isn’t it?’”

Van Badham, newspaper columnist and writer of multimedia show Notoriously Yours, disagrees. “Since adopting this strange double career of mine in journalism and theatre, I've become particularly interested in the differences in form between the two and the potential of theatre to ‘speak’ to journalism – that is, to provide the speculative space for the implications of what's revealed in reportage.”

Notoriously Yours attempts to create that speculative space by reimagining Alfred Hitchcock’s noir spy thriller Notorious against the backdrop of the contemporary surveillance state. For Badham, it is a non-didactic way of discussing difficult political issues, using the noir genre as a metaphor. “Noir obviously is the perfect stylistic complement to a story about surveillance because noir explores the hidden and unseen, the shadowy edges of the personality, the mutability of objects in light,” she says.

A popular genre is similarly twisted in Theatre Ad Infinitum’s show Light, which speaks the visual language of dystopia and science fiction. “The style, I felt, had to be embedded with metaphors,” Mann explains. The central metaphor is right there in the title. The use of LED torchlight in the show was inspired by the visions of the future that Mann saw in science fiction, while simultaneously discovering that “light” is a GCHQ codename for metadata and personal information. And much like noir, it also evokes the shadowy unknowability of being surveilled.

“We’re literally keeping the audience in the dark,” says Mann. “It creates a very filmic effect, but it’s also very controlling. So the audience get to feel sometimes that they’re in control and sometimes that they’re not in control.”

One genre that audiences might not expect to see dealing with this subject matter is comedy. Michael Franco’s play The Interview, however, operates on the logic that laughter can be just as unsettling as horror. The piece looks at enhanced interrogation techniques in a state dominated by surveillance, exploring the idea of torture on stage. Franco insists that humour is central.

“Granted it’s a very dark and fucked-up comedy, but it is a comedy nonetheless,” he says. He adds that his aim is to hold the mirror up to audiences, hoping that they will “not be afraid to laugh even when it’s that guilty uncomfortable kind of laugh”.

Creating a sense of discomfort and complicity on the part of audiences is an aim of much of this work. Just as those watching City of the Blind are put in the position of those conducting surveillance, Badham explains that her manipulation of noir conventions in Notoriously Yours “recruits the audience into a vicarious surveillance role,” thereby forcing theatregoers to face the sinister implications of this observation.

In a less confrontational way, Light uses dystopia as a way of looking differently at the present. “Actually it’s not about the future, it’s about distancing ourselves from the present so we can better see it,” says Mann. “It’s about giving perspective to the present using the metaphor of the future.”

Mann acknowledges that his contribution is unlikely to change the world, but he hopes—like many of these theatre-makers—that he can at least jolt audiences out of their complacency and get them thinking about an issue that is ever more central to our lives. “This could and does happen to anyone,” Franco stresses – a message that is at the heart of The Interview. As Badham chillingly points out, surveillance already affects all of us.

“Think back to every dirty text message, illicit Tinder conversation or webcam session you've done, and imagine someone having that information at their disposal to share with whom they've chosen. Now realise that that this is not an imaginative situation; that data is already recorded, saved and accessible to people you don't know, you didn't elect, you can't see and have no control over. How're you feeling now?”