NINE EXPERIMENTS TO CHANGE THE WORLD (Southwark Playhouse Young Company/Southwark Playhouse)***

 

By Emma

Link: https://www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/show-homepage/nine-experiments-to-change-the-world 

Available until: 22^nd April

Nine Experiments to Change the World is a Zoom play which was written (apart from the bits by Shakespeare, Tony Kushner and maybe other people I didn’t notice) and performed by the Southwark Playhouse Young Company.

It’s about a group of people who meet on Zoom. Each of them has done a sort of play which is about an important issue which affects the world. They take it in turns to present their play, which are seen as ‘experiments’, then they discuss it as a group to decide what the play is trying to say. I’m not sure if many ideas would actually change the world but it’s totally realistic that if you get a group of people together and ask them to try to change the world, they won’t all come up with something that would actually change things.

Topics include the way people exploit themselves on social media, the cruelty of eating meat, and religion. Another topic which wasn’t addressed in the video but was mentioned in discussion is whether a straight actor has the right to play a gay character. I can kind of see the point of giving gay characters an opportunity but isn’t acting about playing people who aren’t like you as well as people who are? Does this mean asexual actors can only play characters who are either asexual themselves or who don’t have an obvious orientation? And what happens when you need an actor to play a murderer, do you have to get someone who’s been in prison for murder because they’re the only people who can really understand the character?

It’s a really good idea but I’m not really sure the individual videos are getting to the heart of the topics. There’s one where a girl called Luna does a livestream called Date Me where she gets some quite inappropriate calls and I found it disturbing to watch but it seemed like Luna was having fun and that she was in control of the situation. It could be that she’s only pretending to have fun and she’s not as much in control as she thinks she is but I don’t feel like that possibility was really explored.

The discussions where they try to figure out what each play means are interesting because that’s what I do with reviews. First I need to figure out what’s going on on the surface, then I need to figure out what’s going on underneath. But I kind of have mixed feelings about doing that because you often end up thinking things which the writer never intended and that’s probably quite annoying for the writers sometimes. I bet some of them are just trying to tell a good story to make people happy. Sometimes I felt the discussions in the play were really serious and relevant and sometimes I felt like the play was making fun of reviewers for searching for deeper meanings and I thought that was quite funny because it’s so true. I know I’m not a proper reviewer but I can relate.

The acting is seriously good. Luna (I’m not sure of the actors’ real names) gets the sex kitten persona perfect and she’s really likeable too. Charles’ Angels in America scene was really good. Harvest has a great new-age sort of vibe (I don’t mean that in a rude way) and she seems very passionate about not eating meat, she’s not just jumping on a bandwagon. Dawson does some brilliant creepy religion stuff (most religion isn’t creepy but it can be used in a manipulative way). The characterisation is good. There is also a lot of creativity, using different Zoom backgrounds. The glove puppet giraffes worked really well and the hands in Pat’s experiment are weird but interesting.

Nine Experiments to Change the World is a really interesting play. I’m actually wondering if their deeper aim wasn’t so much about being clever, it was about creating something that gave the actors a chance to show off their talents. If that was the deeper aim it definitely worked.