One AJ Stanley went to China and saw internet addicts hacking away at firewalls underground. The resultant piece of theatre has been delightfully adapted by a bunch of second-year Wadhamites and is on at the Burton Taylor this week. I urge you to go and see Network because it is well directed, unpretentious, high-quality student theatre on something interesting and current.
These are not your usual Oxonian thesps. Adrienne Joy's team has taken a good, manageable modern script replete with scenes pertinent to students – a mum reminiscing in 2030 about the heydey of Facebook, a geek philosophising about his rejection of 'real', as opposed to cyber, life – and is delivering it with charm and efficacy.
There are some weaknesses to the stageplay. Evie, the woman providing 'anti-communal' www connection services to a secret few, is slightly underdeveloped. In a wonderful moment, she explains that you can either brainwash your kid with pro-social propaganda, or 'tell them the truth': they turn out “gits” either way.
In this hour-long production there is barely time for us to get a handle on Evie and her relationship with her proxy or scrambler, the master machine 'Donald' she (a genius with revolutionary fire in her belly) has built amidst terrifying police-state oppression so that a handful of young people have (the) freedom … to mess around on MSN messenger. Yet Hannah Moore and Liza Greenhalgh make a diverting mother and daughter within the Orwellian context of the (touchingly communalist) undercover internet hotspot.
Nick Pullen's redeemable waster is vituperatively amusing, but Phill Brown is even better as the web-dating geek who falls in love with the “real girl” Sophie (Arabella Currie) who walks into the shop seeking a way to identify her anonymous long-distance internet boyfriend.
Theatre like Network, which combines a light touch with weighty social questions, should be more prevalent in Oxford. In fact, we should be writing on these issues ourselves, not churning out the usual endless stream of No Exits and Shakespeares.
Under the guise of a futuristic 'no leisure-internet' conceit, this play probes needful questions about trust, privacy and 'security' and seems to conclude that real life is just as much of a gamble as a bout of blind cybersex. The internet ought not to require any more stringent moral confinement than does the scary business of being existentially free, just in general. People, even glued to their screens, emerge well here in their fight against totalitarianism.
These are not your usual Oxonian thesps. Adrienne Joy's team has taken a good, manageable modern script replete with scenes pertinent to students – a mum reminiscing in 2030 about the heydey of Facebook, a geek philosophising about his rejection of 'real', as opposed to cyber, life – and is delivering it with charm and efficacy.
There are some weaknesses to the stageplay. Evie, the woman providing 'anti-communal' www connection services to a secret few, is slightly underdeveloped. In a wonderful moment, she explains that you can either brainwash your kid with pro-social propaganda, or 'tell them the truth': they turn out “gits” either way.
In this hour-long production there is barely time for us to get a handle on Evie and her relationship with her proxy or scrambler, the master machine 'Donald' she (a genius with revolutionary fire in her belly) has built amidst terrifying police-state oppression so that a handful of young people have (the) freedom … to mess around on MSN messenger. Yet Hannah Moore and Liza Greenhalgh make a diverting mother and daughter within the Orwellian context of the (touchingly communalist) undercover internet hotspot.
Nick Pullen's redeemable waster is vituperatively amusing, but Phill Brown is even better as the web-dating geek who falls in love with the “real girl” Sophie (Arabella Currie) who walks into the shop seeking a way to identify her anonymous long-distance internet boyfriend.
Theatre like Network, which combines a light touch with weighty social questions, should be more prevalent in Oxford. In fact, we should be writing on these issues ourselves, not churning out the usual endless stream of No Exits and Shakespeares.
Under the guise of a futuristic 'no leisure-internet' conceit, this play probes needful questions about trust, privacy and 'security' and seems to conclude that real life is just as much of a gamble as a bout of blind cybersex. The internet ought not to require any more stringent moral confinement than does the scary business of being existentially free, just in general. People, even glued to their screens, emerge well here in their fight against totalitarianism.