July 10, 2008
It’s unfortunate that, in some circles, to describe a piece of art as ‘sweet’ is an insult. It suggests something coy, shallow and childish. Infinite Lives is one of the sweetest pieces of theatre I’ve seen for a while, and it is the opposite of all of those things.
To start with it’s certainly not coy. John, played with lovely understatement and comic timing by Jon Spooner, has quit his job. Ostensibly he’s taking time out to write a science fiction novel. Actually, he’s retreating from an outside world with which he can no longer cope into a whirlwind of internet pornography – a lot of which we have described to us in exquisite detail. His attempts to formulate a relationship over a one-way webcam with online performer ‘Carlos’, and how that leads him through a small but heartbreaking cycle of tragedy and redemption, forms the bulk of the play’s action.
It’s not shallow, either. Trapped in his flat, trying to imagine the kind of world he wants to create, John’s mind wanders through his fascination with technology, his memories of childhood and the strange nature of the agoraphobia that’s sparked off his retreat. He considers the huge numbers and unexpected connections that rule his life and ours.
It’s definitely not childish, and not merely because of its explicitness. It’s a play about adulthood – indeed, about trembling on the threshold of mid-life (our hero is in his mid thirties) and all that this entails. Mortality hangs unobtrusively but firmly in its background, in the variety of paths not taken, in the impossible ‘infinite lives’ of the title – only possible in computer games – and in the failure of the clean, glittering and pain-free future that John remembers from his childhood to arrive.
So why ‘sweet’? Because ultimately nothing really terrible happens. It even has a happy, if ambiguous, ending. And what’s great about that is that it could easily have been otherwise. ‘Agoraphobic develops porn obsession’ sounds like a recipe for a good old cathartic spiral into poverty and despair. Instead it becomes something we can all recognise – John has a crisis that takes him on something of a rocky inner journey, which returns him to the world chastened but revitalised. On the page it sounds mild, but in truth it generated a wholly different and in many ways stronger emotional connection with the audience than the tragedy it could have become.
To start with it’s certainly not coy. John, played with lovely understatement and comic timing by Jon Spooner, has quit his job. Ostensibly he’s taking time out to write a science fiction novel. Actually, he’s retreating from an outside world with which he can no longer cope into a whirlwind of internet pornography – a lot of which we have described to us in exquisite detail. His attempts to formulate a relationship over a one-way webcam with online performer ‘Carlos’, and how that leads him through a small but heartbreaking cycle of tragedy and redemption, forms the bulk of the play’s action.
It’s not shallow, either. Trapped in his flat, trying to imagine the kind of world he wants to create, John’s mind wanders through his fascination with technology, his memories of childhood and the strange nature of the agoraphobia that’s sparked off his retreat. He considers the huge numbers and unexpected connections that rule his life and ours.
It’s definitely not childish, and not merely because of its explicitness. It’s a play about adulthood – indeed, about trembling on the threshold of mid-life (our hero is in his mid thirties) and all that this entails. Mortality hangs unobtrusively but firmly in its background, in the variety of paths not taken, in the impossible ‘infinite lives’ of the title – only possible in computer games – and in the failure of the clean, glittering and pain-free future that John remembers from his childhood to arrive.
So why ‘sweet’? Because ultimately nothing really terrible happens. It even has a happy, if ambiguous, ending. And what’s great about that is that it could easily have been otherwise. ‘Agoraphobic develops porn obsession’ sounds like a recipe for a good old cathartic spiral into poverty and despair. Instead it becomes something we can all recognise – John has a crisis that takes him on something of a rocky inner journey, which returns him to the world chastened but revitalised. On the page it sounds mild, but in truth it generated a wholly different and in many ways stronger emotional connection with the audience than the tragedy it could have become.