PUBLIC DOMAIN (Southwark Playhouse)***

 

By Cal

Link: https://www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/show/public-domain £15

Available until: Livestreams on 16^th January at 3.15pm and 7.45pm

There’s not much privacy around nowadays. Everyone is expected to have social media profiles. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, snapchat, TikTok… But it’s not just about being a member of the site; you’re expected to produce content too. Personal content. This might be ignored by absolutely everyone or you might be attacked for posting it, but it’s still expected.

The coronavirus has limited our face to face interactions even further (as well as closing all the most interesting places to visit) so there’s even more online interaction. That’s fine if it’s a positive experience, but that isn’t the case for everyone. A lot of people on social media seem very unhappy and I wonder if they really want to be out there in the public domain or if they’d rather keep things a bit more secret.

Perhaps the most public of public domains is the YouTube channel. There are probably millions of videos on there which have never been seen, but some influencers have developed a huge following and have fans… and haters.

But how public is YouTube really? People get to see your face and your voice and to see inside your homes. You could be recognised on the street – and abused on that same street. But watching Public Domain, so many phrases sounded familiar. Even with limited experience of following YouTube channels, these are phrases I’ve heard before. The stock phrases. The soundbites. The claims that all their followers are their friends, even though it would be impossible to interact with them all, even if they tried. The attempts to be upbeat because that’s mostly what’s expected (though some youtubers are open and honest about their mental health problems and I’m sure their openness has really helped people. But they do need to look after themselves too).

So YouTube is visually public, but I wonder if, to an extent, it defeats its own object. The YouTube influencers try to be authentic, but they can’t help getting sucked into all the things they’re expected to say, and the ways they’re expected to say it. I wouldn’t like to call them fake, not if it comes from a completely genuine desire to give people what they want, but I wonder if what we’re really getting is the person they want to be and think they ought to be, rather than the person they are.

We all do it to an extent. No matter how much we might want to be our ‘best authentic selves’, there are times when we know that being our ‘best authentic selves’ will make things more difficult. I think there are several versions of all of us, anyway. I’m a fiancé, a son, a brother, a friend, a student. But I don’t speak to my fiancé, my parents, my siblings, my friends and my tutors in the same way. I’m slightly different with all of them and I wouldn’t say any of the versions of me is any less real than the others.

But whether the youtubers are being truly authentic or not, spending hours posting personal content is really concerning and I think the decision to put it onstage in Public Domain and let people see the world of influencers in a slightly different medium could encourage people to look at social media in a different way.

Public Domain has just two actors who also happen to be the two writers, Francesca Forristal and Jordan Paul Clarke. They play youtubers, appearing on different social media channels, with Swagman and MilliesFitness playing a particularly big role. They play interviewers and presenters, exploring the phenomenon of social media. Both performers do really well at catching the essence of what it’s like to be a social media star. They show the requisite perkiness, sometimes edged with desperation. But they aren’t necessarily shallow people. They’re human beings.

Most of the play is set to music which is catchy and fun. The writing is good too. It points out the flaws and pitfalls of the social media world, but it never seems to be sneering at it. I think there is a lot of sympathy for the characters they play and the worlds they don’t realise they’re trapped in because… isn’t this how the world is supposed to be?

Director Adam Lenson and video designer/associate director Matt Powell skilfully weave together images of the actors onstage and images of the actors appearing on their YouTube channels and on TV. The show is performed live so I’m not sure how it all works, but it all fits together well and although there were technical issues, they didn’t seem to happen in the most technically-challenging moments so I think it was just bad luck.

There are a lot of good things in Public Domain. I would have liked to have seen more of a clear narrative running through the play – perhaps it was there, but I didn’t get a sense of it – but at the same time, this was realistic. Social media is supposed to show people’s lives, and life doesn’t have a clear narrative. Things happen when they happen and not when the laws of drama say that now would be a really good moment for a crisis.

I also didn’t get much sense of the characters’ personalities as we only really saw the parts of us they chose to share. Again, that’s realistic, and it’s also a strength of the piece because that’s one of the problems with social media. They need to be authentic… but always within the limits of acceptability.

It’s like any other part of life to an extent. Be genuine… but not too much.

The difference is that most of us don’t have a million people watching.