Most books, I expect, will at the end be rather different from how they were first imagined; perhaps the likelihood for this happening is greater when the subject is contemporary theatre, which evolves and is subject to alterations—and cancellations—to a higher degree than many other forms of art and literature. Parts of this book are indeed different from how they were initially conceptualised, as a form of recognition for the fact that we are inhabiting shifting ground. As we negotiate our post-COVID-19 world, we are learning that theatre’s thematic range and methodologies have changed and are being recalibrated. Much as this is causing a certain unpredictability it can also be, to an extent, a source of invigoration for the medium. As the direct consequence of research and fieldwork being dynamic processes directly intertwined with emerging conditions in playwriting, theatre-making and theatregoing, this book looks to establish an intuitive dialogue with the new world—including that of the theatre—in which we live, capturing the factors that are shaping this experience. This imperative becomes rather more pronounced in the present chapter, which concerns one of the most significant advances of our contemporary moment: the electronic environments in and through which we experience very considerable parts of our lives.

In 2022, as theatre and the world were coming back to a life that was, once again, beginning to feel familiar, though altered, and as a major pandemic event was still being absorbed in ways that will likely require substantial time to be fully unpacked, two texts landed on the stage dealing with virtual worlds. They explored humans’ cross-embeddedness, the sense of network and isolation, and the playwright’s agency, role and presence in this altered world—both taking stock of emergent conditions and gazing towards the future. These plays were staged within five months of each other at the same theatre, London’s Royal Court. Even their titles were similar: one was Dave Davidson’s This Is Not Who I Am, premiering in June at the Downstairs auditorium in a production directed by Lucy Morrison; the other was Not One of These People, a new play by Martin Crimp, opening in November in a production directed by Christian Lapointe, also in the Theatre Downstairs. Or so were the two texts marketed, because once we began to peel off the layers—an act with seemingly boundless interpretative possibilities in both plays—the first text was revealed to be the new play Rapture by Lucy Kirkwood. Another common thread between the two works, which otherwise went about pursuing this very differently, whether through the story of the couple at the heart of Kirkwood’s play’s enquiry that was presented as a governmental investigation, or through the plethora of changing faces that populated Crimp’s play on a screen, is the way in which they pursued truth and falsity not as binary, but as states profoundly intertwined, all the while probing the playwright’s role in changing, digitally mediated social and artistic environments. COVID-19, it would appear, had ‘mutated’ into something of a dramaturg. The ingenuity of both plays further hinged on their depiction of how sympathy and empathy structures take shape and hold within the digital domain, not least concerning the lives of others, and more specifically the fragments of these, filtered through screens and constructed through non-verifiable (self-)narration.

Rapture/That Is Not Who I Am

I have chosen to cite both titles given to the event I attended at the Royal Court, because both shaped my expectations and response to it as text and performance. Seeing the play on 18 June 2022 meant that I encountered a rather ‘spoiler-free’ context, as reviews only began circulating the following day. The event/play already begins as interspace between its two authors: one real (Kirkwood) and at least one fictional (Davidson, but also the multiple iterations of Kirkwood, addressed further on). It is also an interspace between the two plays’ respective plots: the one I had imagined on the basis of the promotional material, and the one I actually saw on performance night. There is a fluidity inevitably attached to my perception of the piece, therefore, which I rather welcome. I should also introduce this section by stating that I had booked my ticket sufficiently intrigued by the blurb on the theatre’s website, describing a new text by a newcomer playwright:

Dave Davidson has worked in the security industry for 38 years. This is his first play ever produced. (Royal Court Theatre 2022)

There was further reference to a character named Ollie, who experiences internet identity theft, leading to a domino effect impacting their entire life (Royal Court Theatre 2022). In Kirkwood’s play, there is no character named Ollie and, even though the play is extensively concerned with virtuality, internet identity theft is not a focal area. I made the choice to book for the play with the research scope of the present book as a weighing factor, sufficiently convinced that I would be encountering work by a new playwright, and aware of the new text by Crimp, a manuscript of which I had been entrusted with for consultation some months prior to its announcement by the Royal Court. Therefore, I wanted to see what context I might establish in which to situate my discussion of online experience in our present social moment, including its extraordinary augmentation during the pandemic’s most socially distanced times, as well as, of course, its legacies.

It is difficult to judge to what extent my choice to book for the unknown Dave Davidson’s play was determined by my eagerness to support emerging work, or was influenced by the endorsements listed as part of the production promotion on the Royal Court website, as well as, it would turn out, on the back cover of Davidson’s playscript (which served as the sleeve for Kirkwood’s play):

‘This work genuinely has the capacity to change everything.’ Playwright Dennis Kelly

‘It is a play of rare political urgency, savage wit and real compassion and wisdom. It is a play that defines this country as it blinks its way out of the pandemic and into a chilling new world. It is, I think, a startlingly significant piece of work.’

Playwright Simon Stephens

‘I looked up after reading the play and felt like the world had changed. Everything looked different. People need to see this.’ Playwright Laura Wade (Royal Court Theatre 2022)

I made the conscious choice not to query whether these quotations are ‘made-up’, indeed drawn from playwrights that have had long associations with the Royal Court for the purposes of the fictitious narrativisation of the promotional framework of the concocted play, or purposely written by each of these authors with the intent of promoting Kirkwood’s actual play, because my own engagement with and experience of text and production are in agreement with these assessments—and so the point is immaterial. As this section goes on to argue, this is, indeed, a play and performance experience that has the capacity to make a substantial contribution to the redefinition of social and political playwriting. It additionally contributes to our ability to gain some distance—a term I use with appreciation of how much it has come to denote in our pandemic experiences—so as to observe how the world has become transformed; and how we, audiences, citizens and individuals, have been contributing to this very transformation.

It is common for theatres, once a production has been reviewed, to post selected quotations on their websites. It is less common to see the note that the Royal Court website featured preceding review excerpts for the specific play: “Please note: there are spoilers in the reviews below. But if you would like to know more about what you’re about to see, read on” (Royal Court Theatre 2022, emphasis original). Still, the quotes posted remained rather generic, responding to the overall mood of play and production rather than to plot specifics. In their complete versions, however, most reviews were, indeed, filled with spoilers. I found this rather surprising given the ways in which critics often respond to shows with major twists: by hinting at the fact that one such exists, without revealing it per se. The atmosphere of secrecy one encountered at the Royal Court, at least in the early days of the show, was in stark contrast with critical reception and the ways in which reviewers proceeded with revealing the plot of the play and facts surrounding the production. To convey the atmosphere of concealment I encountered, I indicatively note that the play itself was not, unlike what is predominantly the case, on sale at the theatre’s bookshop, where staff politely informed me that they were in possession of the play but unable to sell it before the show, as it would only be sold by ushers after the end of the performance. Ushers themselves appeared even more rigorously trained than previous occasions to deliver the pre-show advice of the Royal Court regarding effects, re-admission and so on—and to clarify precisely where the playtext would be sold at the end of the evening. Finally, upon purchasing the text itself—as per its common practice, the Royal Court does not sell programmes in any other form—spectators found that it came in a brown A5-sized envelope, bearing the stamp “CONFIDENTIAL”. The playtext inside the envelope, and underneath the sleeve, was Kirkwood’s Rapture, with entirely different artwork than that created for the production of Dave Davidson’s That Is Not Who I Am (this was in a magenta colour scheme, featuring the distorted, digital image of a—most likely—male face with a faint, potentially sinister smile on the front, and the promotional blurbs on the back of the cover/sleeve).

The majority of critics revealed Kirkwood as the play’s writer, emphasising her prominence as a playwright versus Davidson’s would-have-been newcomer status. This is mentioned unfailingly, often becoming contentious: critics query the ethics of such a choice in either creating false impressions for the audience or fertilising hope for aspiring playwrights that an emergent voice (if one did calculations, indeed arguably belonging to an older person) might be given such access and a major vehicle for their opening work. I am mostly concerned, however, with the critics’ responses to the thematic range of the play, since its fluidity is such that invites numerous readings and interpretations. At the heart of the plot are Celeste and Noah (Quilter), meeting in a mediated way, sharing a dinner as part of a column that is either precisely, or very adjacent to, Blind Date on The Guardian. They discuss, for example, how they will mark each other out of ten, one of the distinctive tropes of this column (Kirkwood 2022, 6–7). From the start, then, media, especially digital, form a seminal part of the characters’ experience. Celeste and Noah go on to become a couple, live together, marry, have a child—and die, young, under suspicious circumstances.

The key dramaturgical device is that Kirkwood’s text functions by way of an investigation, reconstructing the events of the couple’s lives and death through found evidence emerging, to a significant extent, from their prolific internet life trajectories and self-documentation. The Culture Whisper reviewer describes them as “two British eco-warriors”, offering praise for how “Kirkwood curates the years before the Quilters’ deaths, painting a picture of an instantly likeable millennial couple trying to make ends meet, trying to have a baby, and trying to save the planet” (Sutton Williams 2022). This is the intricate space that Kirkwood’s characters, and of course many in the everyday realm, inhabit: negotiating personal desires and duties in a civic context where they might feel compelled to act by a greater sense of urgency. Beyond greenwashing, what Kirkwood—like Bush in the End of the World (2021)—accomplishes effectively is to communicate that millennials, sometimes dismissed as entitled and apolitical, are, in fact, one of the most socially- and environmentally engaged generations in recent memory, endeavouring to share, more mindfully, including with other species, a planet dramatically damaged by previous generations.

The fact that the space between truth and fiction in art, as well as in life, is fluid, and that Kirkwood locates her play in this very interspace, emerges, also, from the spectatorial feeling of being challenged, convinced of the veracity of the couple’s existence, then surprised to discover they do not exist, as captured in the aforementioned review (Sutton Williams 2022). In an equally positive endorsement, The Guardian review (somewhat ‘meta’, as this was accompanied by the production image of the couple having their matchmaking dinner) concentrated on how “reality and sanity are under constant scrutiny” (Wyver 2022), a feeling that, we might note, has dominated the ‘post-truth’ climate of recent years. The review identifies another element key to how the interspace that is the couple, a together and, yet, formed by two singular individuals site, both part of the world and distanced from it, is a bilateral flow. The above comment, further, highlights one more of the play’s main facts—as well as the essential paradoxes of not only the specific couple’s experience, but of contemporary experience more broadly: the simultaneous apprehension and attraction towards technology. The couple do, after all, create a considerable body of online disseminated videos, first the singular output of Noah, and, progressively, a collaborative product of the two. Or, as the Guardian reviewer notes: “[a]s they create a life together, his resistance to technology rubs off on her, and among the fragile scenes of their relationship, we see them grow increasingly paranoid of surveillance and data collection” (Wyver 2022); their ‘warrior’ stance, as identified in Culture Whisper (Sutton Williams 2022), is, arguably, an outcome of the latter. But they use the means of their perceived enemy to combat its tactics, thereby contributing to the feedback loop. Another endorsement came from The Independent, where the reviewer names the play a “significant work” and, in terms of the space that the play has been occupying in the public’s imagination, as “an internet wormhole”, which, on the basis of how the narrative of its publicity has worked, including the reactions it has elicited, has emerged “like a piece of durational performance art” (Thompson 2022). The durationality is well identified because of the production and marketing conditions pertaining to the specific play, but also because the action that serves as a main theme in the work, namely immersion into the digital realm and a gradual contribution of content to it through different media, both as individuals and as collective internet users, has, itself, created an in-between space where narrative and reality interblend.

Other critics adopted an entirely different approach to the piece: in a nuanced record that expressed a negative opinion overall, the Arts Desk reviewer criticised the show’s publicity dramaturgy (a fitting term if we are to view the play as a durational performance piece) proposing that “this thriller is never very thrilling, the satire is never very sharp and the humour is lukewarm”, while observing a “cynical sensibility” (Sierz 2022). For reasons that I hope the ensuing analysis will reveal, I identified great humanity and care extending well beyond the human world in Kirkwood’s piece, which I found to be as empathetic as it was sobering. The cynical sensibility, to me, arises, on occasion, from reviews—and not from a play, and show, that, without intermeshing narratives, fears and crises to the point of homogenising their singular characteristics, pays equal heed to the challenges that come with being an engaged—and engaging—human, or even character, in contemporary society, or indeed, in the theatre. I found the ways in which play and production probed concerns of lack of community, empathy, contact, agency and engagement to be rich and enriching in equal measure. In my view, these amounted to a text and event that emerged as large-scale and awe-inspiring, without becoming overwhelming or an empty exercise in style.

The play claims to document the Quilters’ (not actually) real life; there are aspects of the couple’s common existence that emerge as strikingly plausible—and that render truth an entirely fluid concept. As Kirkwood shows us, there are methods of documenting watershed developments in how contemporary experience has shifted that, rather than give into the tedium of reconstruction, under which they may even, as in this case, pretend to operate, actually manage to write poetry into an imagined everyday life lived under arduous and fraught circumstances. One reviewer notes: “[t]he documentary claim is quickly punctured yet the play contains a marvellous record of lockdown life. It is already easy to forget how essential it seemed to wash tinfoil and how not everyone was comfortable with the rush to celebrate (but not pay) the NHS; a nurse winces as she hears the doorstep clapping for carers” (Clapp 2022). The moment in the production is poignant—as Celeste slams the household door behind her in an—illicit—search for fresh air, she, as a nurse, expresses indignant exhaustion at the audible community recognition that NHS staff are receiving for their work (a tradition emerging strongly in the early weeks of lockdown in 2020). The clinical self-distancing, spatial and mental, from the world that the Quilters begin to practice as they exist in a space between that is both embedded in the everyday realm and exists separately from it, is enhanced in effect by Celeste’s profession.

As it serves to note that, by all accounts, Celeste is a committed and caring nurse, so it merits a mention that COVID-19, too, has been a classed narrative. Another reviewer remarks: “[t]he working-class Quilters are pulverised by the cost of living crisis, but despite their understandable distrust of the government, their rejection of corporations is easy to mock, isolating them further” (Thompson 2022). The classed resistance to the wealth of an extreme minority, whom Noah consistently condemns through his online videos, that is, becomes even more acute once the pandemic’s classed narrative sets in, affecting access to jobs, and radically transforming the realities of those that, like Celeste, find themselves in the frontline. She is branded an “essential” worker, who, however, receives neither sufficient care, nor compensation (Thompson 2022). The interspace that Celeste occupies—oscillating between praise and neglect—enlarges the gap between the Quilters and society. They begin to drift further away, into a domestic island mentality, while, at the same time, either through Celeste’s profession or Noah’s videos, keeping a sharp eye on developments.

The couple’s engagement is both visceral and detached, reflective of a tense new human condition. The production’s scenography established their simultaneous embeddedness in and distance from the social realm from the start, with the Quilters’ house as a stand-alone structure in the middle of the stage, the theatre’s backstage laid bare, with theatre staff and props always visible, as the set continued to be curated/modified throughout the show. As one reviewer comments, expressing praise for designer Naomi Dawson, the “ingenious set revolves a skeletal apartment in front of a rehearsal space where technicians move about their tasks” (Clapp 2022). Or, as another critic observes, the “revolving set, moved around by stage managers, reveals artifice is at the heart of this story” (Thompson 2022). As private and public crises escalate, the scenographic effect becomes notably darker. A further review delivers an astute assessment, stressing the importance of set design, while expressing a wider point as to the changing spatialities, self- and social moorings occurring after the spring of 2020. In the Quilters’ case, these begin from a significant personal event, the birth of a child following fertility challenges, and move into the collective realm: “[a] daughter arrives, as does the pandemic, with its own shifting map of objective truth. Meanwhile, Naomi Dawson’s inventive set is rotated and re-dressed by stage managers, underscoring that we’re watching a fiction” (Curtis 2022). The play’s scenographic world, then, offers the ideal visual representation, with the full scale of the Royal Court’s spatial hollowness visible behind the set of the home—on a scale very rarely seen in productions—to suggest that, in their own site, the couple are forever floating “in and out of affection, daily concern, apocalyptic alarm” (Clapp 2022). Their space augments and contracts, as do their feelings. Nothing is stable, rooted or to be taken for granted. Vulnerabilities, even in the face of strongest conviction, commitment and—equally importantly—emotional rapture abound. Rapture, it appears, can enwrap and isolate in equal measure.

Beyond such slow rapture, the moments of pronounced, or observable rapture in Kirkwood’s play are two, and they both happen in in-between spaces. The first is at the restaurant where Celeste and Noah are enjoying their first date in 2011; it is a mutual attraction, and, beyond this, fascination, that is only going to grow deeper over the decade of their shared life, as they not only enter each other’s worlds, but also come to create their own shared world together—the same one that, eventually, isolates them from everyone else. COVID-19, as Kirkwood’s text shows us, acts as accelerator and catalyst for this process. The second moment of rapture, and the one that is perhaps more spectacular, memorably enacted by Siena Kelly (Celeste) at the Royal Court premiere, comes when, at an advanced stage in the play, Celeste is raptured. It is now late 2021—a decade since her first meeting with Noah. This rapture, which is shown as a singular, momentary and momentous event, occurs in the couple’s living room, in the home that is both their barrier from and only connector to the outside world: the site of Noah’s videos and of the ever-powerful dynamic between the couple that renders them a practically indivisible entity for which everyone else is an outsider—including close family members, kept at bay, outside a door that functions both literally and symbolically.

Celeste’s rapture is, I propose, a result of her shifting living conditions expediting immersion in an inner life so complete and augmented by the deep-reaching, continuous exposure to self- and external surveillance documentations and mechanisms, gadgets and devices, software and hardware, that its ingrained hypnotic effect becomes part of Celeste’s fibre. So much so, that when the crisis in the couple escalates—primarily financial, but also ideological in their growing separatism—while their interdependency deepens, this creates a quasi-transcendent moment where Celeste, losing her bearings, no longer in control of herself, appears to be seized by an undefined greater force. It is a hyper-enhanced escalation of all the profound emotions at the same time: a moment of emptying and filling up simultaneously, at the other end of which Celeste emerges transformed. The rapture is a space of fluidity in itself, a site inhabited singularly by Celeste, who, even if observed by Noah, allows no margin for external interference or mediation.

In the script, the moment is introduced by one of the frequent interventions of the stand-in authorial figure called ‘Lucy Kirkwood’, who steps in to dispel the suspicion of marital conflict, offering their own interpretation of the bloodied rags discovered in the couple’s bathroom following their deaths: namely, that rather than violence, they were a sign of period poverty. Having understood, then, that at this stage of events we encounter Celeste in what, with even the essentials now removed, is fast becoming for her an escalating state of radical physical, mental and emotional reckoning, we experience the happening that in Kirkwood’s text is described as follows:

Night. CELESTE enters.

She takes the Christmas presents [left by her family, who were not invited into the home] out of the bag. She finds the one addressed to her. She unwraps it carefully and slowly.

She takes out a china vase shaped like a hare.

CELESTE’s body starts to rock and spasm.

CELESTE drops the vase.

NOAH runs in.

NOAH holds CELESTE as she keens. Her body jerks and flails but her eyes look upwards. This goes on for some time. (Kirkwood 2022, 67)

Moments later, “CELESTE sits very still in a chair. Her eyes are open. She is seeing something we cannot see” (Kirkwood 2022, 67). Or, as Noah will relate to his brother in a phone call, “Celeste got raptured today” (Kirkwood 2022, 67). Already in the mode of execution of the otherwise everyday call between Noah and his brother we have two significant clues: the call, on Noah’s end, is on a Nokia mobile phone model (3310) that, for all Noah’s deep familiarity with technologies, or, precisely because of it, is, at the time of the call, twenty-one years old. And then there is the way in which Celeste’s rapture is communicated: as an ordinary event, given that, immediately prior to Noah relaying it to his brother, we hear him state that there is not anything particular to report, presumably as answer to a standard question regarding any news. The rapture itself is not brought on by anything other than an ordinary object—if, here, outlandishly out of context given the pressing household needs that render luxury irrelevant. The couple, then, inhabit flows and fluid spaces: they oscillate between repulsion and fascination with technology; and between the mundane and the otherworldly. In creating a world that is entirely theirs, they exist in a liminal space both theirs and facilitated—and upheld—on the basis of the same technologies that they proclaim to distance themselves from. Arguably, the rapture that Celeste experiences, in precisely the moment of rupture of this flow, and as an external object, disruptive, is brought into her carefully protected, distanced space, is a result of this very oscillation.

When Celeste attempts to recount the events of her rapture to Noah, it acquires deeper ramifications still:

I don’t know how to describe it. I just suddenly saw the truth of everything like so clearly? Cos, basically what it comes down to is this place has been infected too badly so that’s why it’s rejecting us and but that’s okay because there’s another, like a better place than this? Which is like, we don’t own it but it’s ours? And us and Candy [their daughter] can go there together, cos you and me are basically one soul and actually we have been for like, since medieval times. (Kirkwood 2022, 68)

Given that the Quilters die a mere few days later under mysterious conditions, and that Celeste has been under an extraordinary amount of financial (their land/home investment has been proven worthless) and professional/community stress (as a healthcare—also unvaccinated—worker in the frontlines of COVID-19, and having offered a long service, which ends unceremoniously), the radical lucidity that she experiences in the moment of rapture may not only be the result of a cosmic realisation. It may also, that is, arise from extreme anxiety, and the tremendous weight of the prevailing practical circumstances, that, precisely because of her intense sense of cosmic and civic agency, Celeste feels all the more profoundly.

Celeste has, moreover, been reducing in food consumption—another outcome of the Quilters’ dire financial situation. A moment of reckoning, revelation or vision, then, may well be correlational with the body being brought to its very extremes. Even more sombre, the so-called rapture may be the result of the fact that the individual, approaching death, oscillates between reality and delusion. All the while, the civic weight that Celeste carries is made even more unbearable because of the self-aggrandising that Celeste and Noah’s continuous internet presence produces. Celeste, in recounting the rapture to Noah, discloses that it is now time to transition to the next stage, or, as she words it, “People need to see the Truth of how things are” (Kirkwood 2022, 69). The cost of revealing this ‘Truth’, Noah replies, might be their very lives. Some days later, the couple make their most polemical, anti-establishment video yet: “we think it’s time to go to war”, they say (Kirkwood 2022, 71). And even as they convey to their audience the imperative need for a break with the status quo, they rely on information found on the internet—on sites that they will be sharing with their public. As Kirkwood shows here, the fraught relationship between truth and falsity is not only one of ripple effect, but also of intersection: Celeste and Noah seek to expose a digital, perhaps even fake world that they, themselves, cannot but inhabit, compelled by its possibilities. Even the masks—of their own faces—that the couple offer to their supporters so that, in joining them in actions of protest and dissent, their faces are not captured on CCTV, are to be e-mailed to those interested as PDFs. E-dependencies, the play shows us, are deep and even inseverable.

The same holds true of anxieties and their linkages to their causes, which, in a characteristically perceptive and—for all its ambition—not at all stretched, redundant or over-laboured way, Kirkwood reveals to be multi-rooted, embedding a profound ecological distress in the couple. Their contempt of the technologies that monitor and shape lives is also driven by their eco-conscience, which appears on an equal footing to their concerns of justice and equality in terms of class and access as far as the motivating factors for their separatism and activism are concerned. Here, too, COVID-19 appears to play a major role, emphasising, once more, the interlocking of debates when it comes to two major crises of our recent period: the environment and the pandemic. It is COVID-19 that accelerates the couple’s most dramatic distancing from their circle of family and friends; it is also the effects of COVID-19 that, in rewilding sites exhausted from human utilitarianism in its different forms, leaves a trail of environmental grief in Noah, who is unable to accept that the world is about to revert to its prior habits of consumption and exhaustion when the pandemic begins to subside and public spaces are reclaimed by their human users. Observing the resuming of flights, for example, in June 2020, Noah exclaims to Celeste: “It’s all just gonna go back to normal isn’t it?”, and, following Celeste’s affirmative response, “He tries to suppress it, but he starts to sob”; “He tries to control it, but his sobs overwhelm him” (Kirkwood 2022, 59). In this moment, Celeste comforts Noah. As weeks and months go by, the couple’s stresses only increase—we hear from a ‘Lucy Kirkwood’ intervention that an equally exhausted Celeste is “Running on fumes” (Kirkwood 2022, 59).

Noah’s environmental grief, coupled with the unprecedented feelings he—along with multiple others—is reasonably experiencing on account of the pandemic, are the play’s way of dealing with humanity’s recent history through an example that both helps characters come alive and strikes a chord with audiences for whom COVID-19 is an ongoing experience, in this precise moment. Gathered in a theatre in the first half of 2022, spectators are still absorbing the pandemic’s effects while co-existing in the kind of space—an auditorium for live performance—that was amongst those worst affected by COVID-19 closures as a contagious site. The possibilities for empathy in this moment are considerably enhanced, then, and it is this environmental grief that Celeste comes to share as her own tensions escalate.

It is significant that the present Celeste receives from the family she is keeping at a distance, a source of stress in itself, is a vase in the shape of a hare. It is a present that is extravagant (porcelain), but, at the same time, impersonal—an entity she can interact with visually, but that, otherwise, mimics another entity without capturing its liveness: a simulacrum of the non-human natural world that Celeste, like Noah, deems at high risk. In the object, this world is replicated in its most passive, colonised worst: appropriated by the human hand, rendered lifeless. We might describe the moment of Celeste’s rapture as one of enchantment, and of connection with a force greater than herself, or even humanity, and indeed it might be. But there is also greater interpretative potentiality here, especially in the fact that the reaction is triggered by an inanimate object that poses as an animate one—all the while Celeste is becoming increasingly compelled by her environmental agency, and the necessity, but also difficulty of meaningful (inter)action against a crisis in a world relentlessly mined for its resources. As the world pauses and Celeste looks captured, gazing intently outwards, focused but without directing her eyes onto a recipient, the play stages an intense reckoning that features amongst its most powerful moments. For Celeste, it is a transition to her next stage—like a magus, the object has transported her, slowing down time and heightening perception. It is a moment of stark lucidity, but also of quiet disappearance, as it escalates the events of the couple’s death.

The moment provides a rupture between Celeste and the outside world as she previously knew it. Celeste is triggered and repulsed by the object as much as she is fascinated by it—it is the closest we come to an embodiment of the visceral relationship that both she and Noah have with technology, in that case definable as both dependency and mistrust; exposure and fearfulness at the same time. Here, then, settles the grief that catalyses Celeste’s own activism: beyond the grief for her land that she and Noah bought after major financial sacrifices (literally a home-land as that is the site, now legally established as unsuitable, where the couple envisaged building their home), and for the construction of a home that can no longer take flesh, Celeste is also grieving for a home-land—nature—lost to countless others, whether human or non-human. The feeling she experiences—exacerbated by her multi-level exhaustion—ultimately leads her to the role of martyr and messiah, driven by a sense of moral duty that now separates her from the laic and takes her into the cosmic. Technologically enabled distancing, made all the more powerful by COVID-19 and, by now, by Celeste’s absence of contact with the physical realm through the loss of her work, ultimately intersect. Determined to protect what might still have the potential to exist amidst the vast loss for her and her family, Celeste escalates events to the next level.

Echoing Celeste’s account of her rapture, and proceeding from his own unmanageable grief, Noah’s activism is also accelerated. In one of the most telling passages of the play in terms of the couple’s motives, as well as their anticipation of landing in the receiving end of violence, these are the words with which Noah greets his audience, “recording himself on a nineties tape recorder” that would be, as we hear from ‘Lucy Kirwood’, Noah’s last message (Kirkwood 2022, 74):

[…] Everything’s about to become very, very clear, and if they come for us, let them come. Cos we are legion. We are in every blade of grass, every drop of rain, we are the fucking tide and we are about to break on their filthy beach and drown every fat motherfucking sunbather, fill their lying mouths with our salt and leave only Truth on the sand […]. (Kirkwood 2022, 75)

There is an irony to the fact that Celeste seeks to return to a place pure and uncontaminated by external interference when the topographies of her life, as well as of her common life with Noah, and, certainly, of his own life, have been so entirely virtual (Kirkwood 2022, 81). The grief, then, is not only environmental, but also technological—a gradual mounting feeling of desolation for what has been left behind through small acts of separation from staples of their common and individual identities that leaves the two bereft, gradually unhinged.

Even though the connection to the natural environment that the play builds for its two characters is real, so is the remarkable contradiction of their increasing analogue turn and, at the same time, their respective—and common—reliance on web media in all aspects of their lives, not least the dissemination of their message. As ‘Lucy Kirkwood’ frames this in the final stages of the play, following the narration of the couple’s death, the Nokia 3310 had, at the end, been their only medium of contact, with no web-based resource in use:

What did they feel? Satisfied? Lonely? Safe? I admire them. But if it wasn’t for an algorithm, used by the blind date coordinator of a newspaper, owned by a company, owned by a corporation, which is now owned by a different, even larger corporation, being able to process every online trace of them in a millionth of a second… […] …they might never have met and fallen in love at all. (Kirkwood 2022, 81–82)

The contradiction lies precisely in the couple’s very inception, and in their self-narrativisation and self-dissemination. What at first takes flesh as a pairing, and gradually goes on to become the impenetrable unit of the Quilters, is, of course, also the product of digital modes of connection and communication. For all the ideological conviction and activism of the couple, then, there is an ideological gap which they, themselves, perpetuate.

The play is suggesting, in my view, that at a time of not only profound digital literacy—as is the case for Celeste and Noah’s generation—but, also, profound digital embeddedness, the ties, even when attempted to be dispensed with, are so profound, that the extent to which they are part of one’s own intimate constitution past a certain point is not even entirely discernible. There is, moreover, the irony that as the very first materialisation of the couple as such is the business of the internet, from inception to account of the date, so their demise is left to the internet to narrativise: once gone, the Quilters’ death becomes forum fodder, where anonymous strangers, performing their own fetishisation with information and justice, claim to have a moral stake in, a casual interest in, or, even, information about the couple, and their respective deaths. The very last image of the play is precisely such an excerpt from proliferating online dialogues weaving sub-narratives concerning the Quilters. “I am so happy to find this story”, one comment reads, arguably devoid of any motive beyond voyeurism and titillation in search of a vessel for, at best, care; at worst, distraction (Kirkwood 2022, 85; emphasis original).

In closing this section, it is essential to reflect on the authorial trope and the way in which this materialises in Rapture. Kirkwood’s play ‘hides’ beneath another play; the playwright herself is revealed to be the author only once the ruse for the performance, the debut of a newcomer playwright, has been exposed. It is theatrical pentimento of the highest accomplishment; rather than the blurry image of an unidentifiable individual on the cover of the playtext, upon removing the sleeve, we in fact encounter four images of a couple. They appear historical, perhaps turn-of-the century, if we judge from the fact that the image is in black and white, and that the clothes worn by the man and woman depicted point to that time period. The images (not credited) could be described as outtakes: two out of the four have a certain formality; and two shots, intervening and disrupting this linearity, capturing laughter and tenderness and even a certain reticence between the couple, are informal; endearing. Perhaps the photographs are genuine; perhaps they are staged. Either way, the physical disposition of the bodies of the individuals depicted, and their inclination towards each other furnish an impenetrable closeness, an in-between site of intimacy that leaves no margin for distancing or interference. The couple has always been an interspace, inhabiting the soft and sharp territory between private and public, between domestic and social. Such has also been the function of the Quilters in the play.

This effect of the artistic technique is further intensified if we consider narrativisation more broadly, including in terms of how the author writes themselves into the play. Depictions of the playwright herself also unfold layer after layer. The audience might be reasonably expected to hold a mental image of the real Lucy Kirkwood; though perhaps we cannot make this assumption of all that would have encountered the play in its premiere, or in a subsequent production. As Kirkwood—as authorial symbol—becomes dispersed in two actors, while actually being neither of the individuals that stake a claim to her on stage, the playwright’s authority is thrown in disarray, subverted from within. In a play as finely tuned dramatically as this one, the point is significant. There is, as mentioned, the character ‘Lucy Kirkwood’, whose narrations and interjections relating to the in-between events in the couple’s life punctuate the play. She appears on stage frequently. She identifies herself by stating: “My name’s Lucy Kirkwood, or rather, I’m playing Lucy Kirkwood” (Kirkwood 2022, 17). The ‘real’ playwright (of the same name), it emerges, relented close to the play’s opening, so she required a stand-in. Then, there is also ‘The Real Lucy Kirkwood’, or ‘LK2’, who makes an appearance nearing the finale of the play, widening the interspace between truth and falsity, and between fact and fiction. She interrupts the performance and protests as to the artistic—and political—integrity of the piece as she envisaged it, versus the show that the theatre has put on for reasons relating to systemic pressures that required some censorship; some mediation of the truth. She is also played by an actor and is not the actual Lucy Kirkwood. Soon, both ‘Lucy Kirkwood’ and ‘LK2’ speak overlappingly; they argue; the stage manager advises the audience to leave the theatre.

Technology has the final word, as the narrative is written in fragmented dialogues appearing on a screen and capturing the fevered online speculation as to what has happened to the ‘real’ Quilters. Of course, they do not exist. The author does exist, insofar as they are a writer presenting a physical output—the play—but she also does not, absent and relegated to figures that claim to embody her but are in fact no more than her holograms. Authority, then, and ownership of the narrative become fluid territories; so does self and (its) representation. The play exists in-between reality and fiction, in-between the physical and the digital, and in-between art and life. Stories—and storytellers—real and unreal, as well as truth and falsity, their ambiguous interdependence, and the ability to proliferate stories on digital media—with genuine consequences, but with limited, if any accountability—remain with us as the play closes. Such concerns also emerge as primary points of focus in the final case study of this book. Here, the playwright himself does appear on the stage; but whether as himself, or as/in character, remains to be determined.

Not One of These People

While Kirkwood’s Rapture was playing at the Royal Court Downstairs, the theatre announced its season for autumn/winter 2022–2023. Martin Crimp’s Not One of These People featured prominently. It was to be a limited event of only four performances, made further special by means of the fact that it would return the playwright to the stage in a way not experienced in London since Crimp’s piano playing in the early performances of Face to the Wall (2002). Readings or platform events notwithstanding, then, it took two decades for Crimp to inhabit the Royal Court stage as a writer—by which I mean not only as a presence through his texts. Still, very little might have prepared us for the new modes of authorial inhabitation that we would encounter on the stage in the early days of November 2022, when the piece came to the UK after having premiered in Canada earlier that year. The author would be staged as both inhabiting space and being inhabited (by thoughts, others’ voices, or creative processes). The sites hosting this act would, themselves, remain fluid, however physically anchored on the Royal Court stage: the private, the public, the real, the artificially intelligent, the physical and the virtual would, in Crimp’s latest piece, come to blend in ways not only unprecedented, but genuinely groundbreaking for dramatic form and content—and for the very notion of defining narrative, author and presence in the theatre.

I have discussed elsewhere how in the past decade, from In the Republic of Happiness (2012) onwards (also Crimp’s last full-length play to appear on the Royal Court stage a full decade before Not One of These People) Crimp’s writing has become extraordinarily maximalist in thematic scope, while, at the same time, managing to remain as sharp and focused as ever in its lexical world, where there is no room for stretching, redundancies or any particles of speech that do not have a very precise function in the field of the play (Angelaki 2022). We might say that this makes for the perfect antithesis between form and content, though, in my view, it makes for the perfect complementation, where one affirms the other by denying it any predictability or straightforwardness.

As was long-established practice for Crimp by autumn 2022, Not One of These People had internationalism woven into its core, following in the path of several previous plays and opera texts, which were not only internationally co-commissioned, but also received their premieres outside of the UK. Opening as Pas une de ces personnes, the premiere of Not One of These People, described as a creation of the Quebec company Carte blanche, and a co-production between the company, the Royal Court and Carrefour international de théâtre (Quebec), took place at Théâtre La Bordée on 1 June 2022. It was a significant event for different reasons: firstly, because the same production format was applied by director Christian Lapointe for both the Canadian and British performances of the play, meaning Crimp’s presence on the stage in a performing role. Secondly, because Crimp was more emphatically than ever emerging as a fully international and internationalist playwright, whose presence and oeuvre far transcended any prior categorisations and iterations of his work as belonging to the (sometimes loosely defined) European space, however much it might carry its own rootedness within the British cultural domain. This production established resolutely the creative flow, an interspatial site that Crimp’s theatre equally created and represented, where barriers and borders, whether geographical or cultural, were rendered rather irrelevant, and indeed redundant. As this section goes on to discuss, interspatiality is equally crucial to the play’s form, content and staging.

Critics reacted to the piece with reviews that are a composite of attempting to log a very liquid performance experience, in that sense a similar feeling to Rapture/That Is Not Who I Am, and responding with praise to the production, while registering surprise for the fact that Crimp himself appears on the stage. As one reviewer for Le soleil notes in a particularly insightful response, there are certain questions that the methodologies of the production give rise to, emerging from the fact that the personas speaking Crimp’s text—here we must recognise that these mouths have been enhanced and ‘vivified’ by special effects and given voice, doubly, by the playwright who both wrote and speaks the lines—are algorithmically generated (Marcoux 2022). As the journalist asks, and I expand, we ought to consider how our reactions as audience members might be conditioned; how we might, consciously or not, superimpose narratives based on these non-existent ‘speaking’ individuals’ appearance, and on a predisposition to fill in the blanks/backstories of the elliptical stories provided in the text (Marcoux 2022). In a further, equally intriguing hypothesis, the reviewer reframes their initial statement to add that the point might be, rather, that the responses might have been, in fact, given by anyone, since the creators of the piece chose to assign the statements to individuals that do not, actually, exist (Marcoux 2022).

From the point of managing our own projections and predispositions, then, we are led to that of interchangeability and universality: no matter the natural tendency to associate certain commentary with certain individuals, there is no such thing as a cross-verifiability of subject and statement in a social media dominated, virtuality-saturated, post-truth, ChatGPT era. At such a time, web identities are nearly (if not entirely) avatars—and they can be the image of one person, or of anyone at all, with data manufactured, appropriated, proliferated and falsified. In terms of how the stage experience emulates the everyday experience—not anymore in terms of the naturalist reproduction of everyday life detail, but in terms of the faithful digital reproduction of the virtuality that has come to constitute everyday life, the critic for Le soleil makes a further astute comment: that the images of the (non-)persons we see, sometimes complete with background noise that augments their verisimilitude, will remind us of the faces we are so accustomed to seeing on social media screens (Marcoux 2022). Or, likewise, that as inhabitants of a “digital environment” (“environnement numérique”) where we encounter a multitude of discourses attached to and stemming from profile photos, we exist in the midst of individuals that we do not necessarily know—and, one might add, we may not always be in a position to verify (Marcoux 2022). The entire proposition, but, perhaps, especially the term “digital environment”, reinforces both the concreteness and the abstraction of such a space, which is both real (as in sensorially experienced) and not (as in remotely mediated). Therefore, the review captures the interspatiality of both the play and our experience beyond the theatre.

The cohesion between subject and speech, then, has been broken; the same has happened to coherence when it comes to narratives or to the non-linearity of everyday life. The form that the playwright selects in order to tell the stories of our contemporary lives, interwoven yet disparate, is precisely the one that suits the reality of fractional stories, that appear as flashes, narrative moments with which we interact, and which, then, disappear from our transient temporality, even though they occupy a much more permanent digital path (unless they are deleted by their instigator/host, and therefore vanished in another uncertain space). Even the term ‘wall’ that one of the most prominent social media platforms, alluded to, arguably, by the reviewer, originally associated with the foundational concrete spatial structure, eventually gave way to the much more fluid term ‘timeline’ which prioritises durationality as flux rather than as fixed. It is a space which one can visit circumstantially, but which will very much exist as a log of our past temporal behaviours in interspaces physical and not, as are our digital environments.

Crimp’s play, moreover, written in quarantine times, reflects the social distancing that we experienced in the context of COVID-19, when, for many, the closest we could come to ‘human’ contact was faces on a screen captured in sharp detail, but otherwise disembodied—and of course subject to all imaginable technological malfunctions and disruptions of any attempted conversational linearity. But Not One of These People is not only a COVID-19 play; it is not even only a play for COVID-19 times. It is, rather, a play that reminds us that, beyond the necessity to exist—and to engage with each other—behind and through a screen, which COVID-19 introduced to our lives, this is a choice that we had already made, in terms of the primary interactive methods through which our communications and relationships had long been carried out before the pandemic. In Crimp’s long history of prescient theatre, where major social shifts are sensed and deposited on the page—and stage—before their full scale comes to land in ways more public, Not One of These People, judged historically, will, perhaps, come to occupy a distinctive space. It is not only COVID-19 and digitisation as we knew it that will always highlight its foresight: it is also the emergence, in the late months of 2022 and especially in 2023, of ChatGPT as a radical remapping device for the digital terrain itself—and for the omnipresence and infiltration of AI (Artificial Intelligence) in, effectively, all major aspects of human life, function and interaction.

As other reviewers noted, the piece was entirely in sync with its moment given our era of social media and digital technology omnipresence (Leclerc 2022). The reviewer for Journal de Québec relies on another term to describe the process of the play’s representational curation: “hypertrucage”, meaning ‘deepfake’, or, to use another term that the same reviewer incorporates in the later part of the same analysis, “vrai fictif” (Leclerc 2022, my emphasis). The Quilters in Rapture might be thought of as one such case: an entirely plausible, conspiracy-theory era story, which enters yet a deeper level of deepfake, once, towards the finale, an image of the ‘actual’ couple shows on screen (Kirkwood 2022, 82). Proliferating personas appear to guarantee, even certify, a form of truth and legitimacy—not unlike the multiple ‘Lucy Kirkwoods’. At the same time, not a single occurrence, is, in fact, real. For all the existential depth that the review for Le soleil encourages through its analytical aesthetics, and which I otherwise endorse, the sobering remark of the critic at Journal de Québec reminds us of what we are dealing with in the play, and in what may, arguably, still be described as ‘real life’: an immersive process in a universe that we have co-created, populated and inhabited—and whose content we have co-produced and proliferated to emulate physical presence and interaction. It is that same content that has, ultimately, displaced the world it was thought to be a substitute for.

Perhaps, then, this is our new naturalism and the human nature we are engaging with is both real and not; both actual and mediated—because such is the fidelity that is required to attempt to capture our present time. It is this seemingly perennial, unverifiable populace of a multitude of subjects conversing on a “multitude of subjects” (“une multitude de sujets”) that we, and the play, are dealing with on a constant basis (Leclerc 2022). If our physical world—our natural environment—has been damaged by overpopulation and resource drain, the same claim could be extended to our digital world, saturated by falsity that presents itself as truth, and resource-drained (whether in terms of bandwidth or mental health) in ways that have led to toxicity not necessarily, or not always, bound to CO2 emissions, but with their own corrosive risks of pollution and harm. The spatial framing is central here, too: the reviewer comments that Crimp’s play is “a large public square similar to those we find on social networks” (“une grande place publique semblable à ce que l’on retrouve sur les réseaux sociaux”) (Leclerc 2022). In this phrase alone it is showed how the virtual and the physical coalesce in a new iteration of site of experience—the interspace.

With reviews brimming with praise and unfailingly mentioning Crimp’s presence on the stage for one of the three performances (Lapointe took the stage for the next, and remaining, two in the premiere production), it is a short and directly to the point remark made by the reviewer of Revuejeu that identifies the immediate political urgency of the piece, described as “a troubling chronicle of present times” (“une troublante chronique du temps present”), emphasising the play’s interventionist role in not only staging, but also historicising the contemporary (Richard 2022). Such a gesture requires vision as well as responsibility; we are literally looking, as Crimp notes, crediting the work of Guillaume Levésque, at “299 images” all “generated by Artificial Intelligence (by a method known as GAN, or generative adversarial network). At a certain point they come completely to life, my own voice and spatial movements mapped onto theirs live as I speak” (Crimp 2022, 62). A novel physical and artistic territory is emerging. As one reviewer observes, this technology produces “an image of a pluralistic, multicultural, multigender society, a kind of mixed and hybrid aggregate at the very heart of the empire that is disintegrating” (“un instantané d’une société plurielle, multiculturelle, multigenre, une sorte d’agrégat mixte et hybride au coeur même de l’empire qui se désagrège”) (Richard 2022). We might ask which empire the reviewer is referring to—whether it is the British empire, a comment with reference to the British origin of the text that is premiering outside that specific context at a time when, following Brexit, the country’s national narrative is experiencing fluidity and redefinition, and the country itself an isolation and shrinkage, or the orthodox empire of the physical world that had claimed primacy in human contact for all too long. Either way, the sovereignty of the territory is being ceded, and an indeterminate space is borne out of a fissure that expands, where the virtual and the physical are both to equal degrees real and unreal at the same time.

This space, multi- and densely inhabited, irreducible to binarisms, and dynamic by virtue of its amalgamatic nature, is characterised by the hybridity between true and false, tangible and intangible. This hybridity, for all its confusion, is also where social redefinition happens while stock is being taken on how technology, virtuality and digitisation have reshaped our lives—with our own agency seemingly being co-opted in the process. But it is also, as the critic’s phrasing reminds us, the pandemic that has had this same, if not stronger, effect, and that has served to hybridise both space and experience. The very term “hybrid aggregate”, which the reviewer develops, is reminiscent of the convoluted spatialities that we experienced during COVID-19, when “hybrid” became the ultimate term through which to define sites that were both virtual and physical at the same time, both clickable and inhabitable, both the ‘real’ world and not. Hybrid was the term through which binarism collapsed, and our vocabularies—and cognitive moorings and unmoorings—recalibrated themselves towards their current, and arguably also their future states.

The review narrative continues in a style that nurtures interrogations of spatialities and perceptions in Crimp’s piece, enhanced with concerns relating not only to the virtualities that are forming our contemporary experience, but, also, to anxieties stemming from the other major crisis of our time: the environmental one. Critics highlight how the piece “finds itself at the centre of an ontological question where ethnocentricity, culminating in the Anthropocene, henceforth tips over into an agonizing transhumanism” (“se trouve au centre d’une question ontologique où l’ethnocentrisme, culminant dans l’anthropocène, bascule désormais dans un transhumanisme angoissant”) (Richard 2022). The reference to a ‘centre’ is fascinating, especially as the remainder of the sentence destabilises the very notion: the centre has been redefined, but, more than that, undermined by uncertainties so great regarding positionality, interactivity and interaction on physical and digital realms, that a new sense of being has been produced that thrives on unfixity. This interspace can be awkward and unsettling, but it is also dynamic and honest—a site that does not frame itself on false premises of long-lost linearities and cohesions.

The critic’s comment is also crucial because it locates the human-exacerbated climate crisis within the realm of transgressive nationalisms that, adopting the neoliberalist model, have prioritised local gain over the greater (human and non-human) benefit. As the coalitional has been displaced by the ethnocentric, then, so the ethnocentric is being displaced by its own insular principles, which have driven it to a spectacular impasse. Here, the frame of self-isolation and distancing developed in hybrid spaces during COVID-19 emerges as the ideal partner for the socio-political-geo-cultural isolation that the piece criticises through its depiction of radical, unaccountable insularities—the singular, fluctuating, ubiquitous and yet untraceable talking heads—that beyond a personal trope become a collective crisis. We ought not to be surprised that one viral context, then, mimics the characteristics of another; and it has taken a virus identified by medicine to fully manifest the viral capitalist behaviours that lead to extraordinary transgressions. In acquiescing to unaccountability—towards the non-human environment—we have also embraced it as an overall schema, whose consequences, in the radical untraceability of truth or of existence, the play emphatically reveals. This is as much the trope of the digitally created as of the ‘real’: sites are no longer only one or the other; neither are their inhabitants.

The pluralism of Crimp’s text renders it irreducible to critical narrativisation and linearity. The only interconnecting commentary that one could reasonably offer relates precisely to this multivocal multitude; this is where the play’s cohesion is to be found, because this is indeed a cohesive text, though not in the way that we might expect—not even from Crimp, who, with each new text, ventures to a dramatic elsewhere. It is important, here, to consider the essay that Crimp wrote as a rare form of explanatory note to the text. The Royal Court turned to this essay to frame its production publicity; previously, the essay had been published on Canadian press outlets ahead of the play’s premiere. It is a short text that is significant for many reasons: firstly, because it identifies references that informed Crimp’s text dramaturgically and stylistically. In distinctive Crimp mode, these touchstones are remarkably diverse and historically and artistically rooted and impactful: Boccaccio’s The Decameron; Forced Entertainment’s Speak Bitterness (Crimp 2022, 61). The dramaturgy of Crimp’s text is set to the rhythm of the viral pathologies that plague not only Boccaccio’s time, but, also, our own—the altered patterns of the everyday whose viscerality impacts not only the body of the subject, but, also, the body of the text. The pathologies of society, individual and collective, are written into the form of the text; therefore, they impact not only what story is told, but also how it is told: in fragments. It is especially important that these facts combine to formulate a singular (multitudinous) text that, without naming them as such, also takes on the conditions that brought us to this very disregard for arguably, self as much as others: the kind of separation from our environments, human and otherwise, that facilitated outcomes such as the virus (here it is relevant to recall Marchesini specifically (2021)).

But the text runs even deeper than that regarding the practical socio-theatrical circumstances that compelled its specific dramaturgy, namely, the viability of staging that, as Crimp notes, was contingent on how theatres would be best equipped to produce a play under social distancing and attendance measures as emerged during COVID-19 (Crimp 2022, 61). As Crimp mentions, the durationality of the pandemic itself continued to influence the form of the piece in its stages of conceptualisation and formation (2022, 61–62). Arguably, the single presence of the one ‘live’ performer—the playwright, or the director—sharing the stage with virtual but no less ‘live’ personas, was another way of ensuring viability of staging under shifting, fluid and uncertain global conditions. This led to the piece becoming “a strange kind of ninety-minute monologue” (Crimp 2022, 62), and, through its delivery, a razor-sharp representation of contemporary humanity with, strictly speaking, traditional (physical) forms of humanity largely absent from the stage, of course with the exception of Crimp (or Lapointe).

Rarely might we imagine the Walt Whitman phrase of one entity “contain[ing] multitudes” being used more imaginatively on the stage in a way that allows us to reframe the political activism and poetry of these words as both timeless and co-emergent (Whitman 1855 [2012], 67). Creating a thematic and production interspace, the play also, exists as an interspatial site in a more total sense: its concerns unite the three stages of COVID-19, pre-, during- and post-, as the text creates a malleable space which holds together all the egotism, anxieties, failures and transgressions that pre-existed, endured and even became exacerbated at pandemic times. These, the piece suggests, are more than likely to continue to shape our lives as the reliance upon and allure of digital technologies, and of living one’s life on and through these platforms persists, carrying with it the legacies of life under a pandemic and the multiple recalibrations it produced in concepts of absence, presence, distance and co-existence—including in parallel, overlapping but not truly intersecting lives. Here, as in Rapture, we observe the cross-applicability of the theoretical framework developed in Chapter One, largely proceeding from Robert Latham and Saskia Sassen (2005), as well as Anthony Elliott and John Urry (2010).

In his aforementioned essay Crimp praises Lapointe’s concept of “linking the text to contemporary internet culture” (Crimp 2022, 62). The text itself furnishes possibilities for the shorthand speech that the medium has encouraged, but, also, for the more extensive digressions that have treated the internet as a receptive ear where users can self-narrativise without the limitations of ‘real time’—for example, the length of a conversation, or a therapy session—and without, necessarily, (anticipating any) interjections or responses. As much as the internet has condensed speech stylistically and formally, so, also, it has expanded it spatially. Crimp’s text, once more, engages with these developments both structurally—through the shape of different ‘confessions’—and thematically, through their content.

It is not possible to be exhaustive in the analysis of a text as maximalist as this one; mindful of the fact, the selected quotations that follow are curated to serve the purposes of the present discussion. Keeping to the overall remit of this book, which emphasises concerns of locationality and site with a specific environmental focus, I would like to concentrate on related aspects of Crimp’s text, an approach which also provides a bridge to the other case study of this chapter. The modalities through which Crimp’s text considers multi-spatialities—physical, experiential, emotional, virtual—and the ways in which these combine and culminate in an expression of varying, interweaving and emotionally escalating attitudes to the natural world and to one’s positioning within it, all the while throwing identity, authority, personhood—and therefore agency—into disarray, make the text equally intriguing and challenging. In the ensuing excerpts, environmental discourses gather momentum through different expressions of, alternatingly, longing, concern, anxiety, as well as grief towards the natural world.

In the early stages of the play, we hear:

  1. 6.

    I’ve never seen the sky looking so blue.

[…]

  1. 31.

    I like trees, I like nature, I like to be outside […] (Crimp 2022, 10, 13)

Or further on, in different style:

  1. 186.

    I faked shame, I faked guilt, I failed to re-enchant the world, when I walked through a country lane I slashed the tops off flowers. (Crimp 2022, 38)

Although the three quoted comments are variational in tone and even suggestive of diverging attitudes, they share a certain romanticism, not merely in emotion, but in the Romantic sense of exploring, and becoming immersed in the natural world—or at least attempting to. The first remark communicates a sense of awe—even of fulfilment, perhaps as the speaking subject is caught off-guard and surprised at the sudden revelation. The second statement, followed, in the text, by the expression of a desire to be taken seriously rather than mocked for making this confession, anticipates certain cynicism at sharing an attitude of openness to the natural world, which might be interpreted, indicatively, as quaint and old-fashioned. The statement could also be dismissed as a blatant contradiction for being made in a digital environment, since, while the speaker is making the statement, they have clearly selected to be online (and, therefore, absorbed in a device of some form). There is, further, the potential implication of what the ‘outside’ referred to has come to stand for in COVID-19 times: a desire for something that has become less secure, and less likely to be taken for granted than previously. Moreover, the individual’s relationship with the world beyond the screen itself has become, since COVID-19, much altered and more heavily problematised, leading to not only a quaintness, but, even, to a potential untenability of statements such as that made by 31. Then, there is the third statement, combining two modes of aggression: one externally-, and one internally directed. Both, however, are an expression of the same lament, and an iteration of failure and grief at a separation. This concerns feelings of disconnection from nature, as well as of reduced agency—the comment reveals the fraught symbiosis; we might interpret it further as climate anxiety manifesting as hostility. The comment regarding the re-enchant[ment] of the world allows a connection to Rapture: there, Celeste’s own climate anxiety is manifesting as a form of reverse enchantment—a realisation of what might have been, but that is, likely, irretrievably lost. Its absence generates a state of profound interruption, of inhabiting an indeterminate space where the ideal exists, and it attracts and compels, but with a sense of unbridgeable distance and suspended longing rather than attainable satisfaction, or pleasure.

Elsewhere, the feeling becomes even more pronounced, expressing an aggravated state of hostility towards the self, as a means of coping with one’s own transgressions, lack and duplicity:

  1. 198.

    I tailgated, I bitched, I over-ate, I over-thought, I released particulates into the atmosphere.

  1. 199.

    I released particulates, I bitched, I compromised, I deceived myself, I said I’d water my neighbour’s pot-plants but when they came back from holiday their plants were all dead. (Crimp 2022, 39)

The consecutive statements reminiscent of darker corners of the internet, spoken by voices inhabiting a space of confession and seeking, through the act of sharing, a sense of recognition and even validation, a claiming of visibility for one’s faults and one’s plight, and, perhaps, even, a form of redemption, reach deeper into environmentally transgressive behaviours. Here, these are paired with acts of self-harm, direct and indirect, physical and emotional—all in the vein of manifesting an excess that is equally harmful to the individual and to the world beyond them—both animate and inanimate. If one fails as a responsible entity, the text suggests, they fail entirely, on multiple, interconnected levels. The feeling of anxiety and inadequacy persists, though, here, with a reduced sense of empathy towards the self, and a yet more pronounced detachment. The poetry of the preceding statements is, also, notably displaced here by a prosaic speech style. As the play moves dramaturgically towards its later sections, so the tone follows, amplifying the sense of the virtual itself: a rabbit hole where time, in its vacuity, proliferates a sinking feeling.

As the text accelerates, we are drawn even further into the worlds of imagination and nightmare, where the utopian and dystopian appear as escalating reformulations of each other. In the statements that follow, the poetry returns—and, with it, different scenarios for the more spectacular interactions between human and natural world, from the sublime to the apocalyptic:

  1. 206.

    Turns out I’d been buried under – what did they say? – exactly: five hundred metric tonnes of snow.

[…]

  1. 210.

    You could see the fire lighting up the whole sky orange. I was one of the first ones there – it was like a disaster movie – flashing lights and smoke […] somehow I survived when some of my colleagues died – and of course in the end we did finally seal the thing with concrete. But the thought of it, the thought of that mass, that volume, that temperature, the thought of it burning and burning its way down into the earth, through the rock, through the aquifers, maybe endlessly – the thought of that material endlessly on fire – sometimes I can’t sleep, even now.

But then, again, immediately after:

  1. 211.

    And I’m like, oh my god! it’s gone completely green! (Crimp 2022, 40–41)

In the above we can observe the clashes and tensions, but, also, that familiar feeling that we encounter in Kirkwood: rapture resulting not from enchantment, but from the encounter with a force greater than oneself; overwhelming, corrosive and likely human-caused.

The human emerges as an agent in natural catastrophe vignettes, materialising differently in each of the above confessions; the last one, of course, could also be a scenario of natural reclaiming/rewilding. Indeed, it could also be awe: in the Royal Court staging, the image accompanying these last lines was that of a young girl, perhaps four of five years old. It is difficult, here, not to make the association that a ‘green’—or dramatically different from green—future is the bequest to future generations, not least including those who may have come into a depleted world also in the context of one of its most severe crises, in addition to the environmental one: the pandemic. The Quebec premiere of the play considerably predated the London one in terms of pandemic temporalities, therefore occupying a space even more proximate to the material shifts and arising conditions of the immediate post-COVID-19 universe (at least in terms of the worst outbreak stages). The very internationalism of the play, and the fact that, rather than actors—or even humans—it worked with virtual voice vessels in the image of human faces, provided a sense of contextualisation, logging and even cohesion for the disrupted experience that we had become accustomed to during COVID-19. This experience was comprised of flows, uncertainties, extreme separations but also radical unifications. The latter was the outcome of a vast number of different and dispersed individuals having joint, or similar, or at least comparable experiences, as the world moved online, while, at the same time, being tasked with preserving their elusive, intangible physical worlds and human communities by remaining separate from them.

Through references to both utopian and dystopian conditions, Crimp’s text intuitively hints at the fact that in COVID-19 contexts, but, also, outside of these, and as a result of human transgression upon nature, and the increasing enclosure within the digital, the two are simply no longer tenable as binaries. Desolation might also be peace; rewilding might also be purification. At the same time, we are reminded that, for all the reclaiming by nature that has occurred, and for all the temporary pause to the acceleration of the climate crisis, the event has already transpired—and its consequences are present, and will continue to loom large. This is not least because, as we have seen in Marchesini (2021), the virus itself might be seen to share root and effect with the climate crisis: callousness; lack of empathy for non-human agents; overconsumption. These are all concerns that recur across Crimp’s play. In statement 206, we encounter the sudden sharing of a life-altering event that, we might argue, is also impossible to imagine surviving: it is a most impactful encounter between the human and non-human, as firstly given in statement 6 quoted previously, which sets the tone for the more dramatic confrontations of this nature that come to occur in the later part of the play. As we are left wondering, still digesting the information, we are soon surprised by yet another statement (210), also about unlikely survival. Where 206 had not quite painted the post-apocalyptic image so vividly, this one does, bringing considerable exacerbation.

This part of the confessions also moves us to novel territory: nature-related emotional trauma. While physical trauma, due to the blunt force of the snow, is indicated in 206, 210 additionally expresses mental trauma at the encounter with the apocalyptic event. The reference to some familiarity with the workings of radiation, and to ‘colleagues’, implies an individual exposed to conditions framed as part of a work task—not necessarily scientific. In what can be read as a profoundly classed comment, we are likely dealing with the survivor of an expedition that attempted to counter natural force: an allusion to industrial capitalist hubris and the devastation it leaves in its wake, including, of course, in precarious human agents expected to serve its imperatives. After the build-up and escalation, 211 will strike us as anticlimactic; and such is its function, introducing yet another attitude to unexpected natural phenomena. Here, we are given so little by Crimp that we need to weigh up context (206, 210) and work by deducing. Green is the by-default colour associated with nature; whether we are dealing with moss, mould—of any scale—or with larger-scale developments, such as, for example, a formerly barren, or even urban landscape being reclaimed by nature, the sentiment is one and the same: awe at that which startles and arrests. A radical change has taken place; a new condition has emerged.

Having encountered the transgressions, having followed them through devastated and reclaimed fields, and having visualised—mentally, not in terms of any stage realism—their effects, we are now crossing over to the dystopian. The content is suggestive of a point zero: the kind of annihilation only possible to speak of in the past tense, confessing to hubris, and evaluating that which can no longer be saved. Here, the text also begins to accelerate towards its final stages, and, by 225, we hear of someone who, in fact, generated an entire universe:

There were trees, there was light, I’d invented animals […] tracts of land, seascapes, high-rise blocks, whole sequences of intolerable desert or of rose-gardens. And sure, there were people in them […] I’d devised this world of mine so none of them could see me looking […] and I still don’t know how I managed to delete it. […] I mean wiped out irretrievably. (Crimp 2022, 44–45)

The above confession, in its entirety one of the most dense in meaning, as well as comparatively extensive in length, points, perhaps, to the roots of life—in another context, one might have even interpreted it as taking on faith in a higher power. Given the overall context of text and production, however, I propose that the segment refers to virtuality and surveillance in the online realm; to software engineering on increasingly plausible and nuanced AI platforms; and to environments that invite users to enter, inhabit and populate them, perhaps, also, by themselves inviting others—all the while being logged, observed and handled.

The above account could come from an engineer, a mastermind responsible for such a platform—and, as such, has a considerable meta-function given the overall concept of the play. There is, also, beyond the technological implication of such a statement, the fact that here we are dealing with the transgressive ownership agendas of global capitalism—and the belief that all aspects of natural and non-natural life are developable, controllable and modifiable at profiteering will. This, it follows, also renders them cancellable, at the point where annihilation occurs, when resources, quite simply, run out; or when technology moves on. The above statement prepares us for what ensues not long after as, in 244, we are offered the view of a persona that confesses uncertainty as to whether humanity can transition into the next century—not a fact that is detrimental, as they say, since, in any case, forms of non-human life are likely to prove more resilient (Crimp 2022, 47). Both 225 and 244, then, express a certain pragmatism, whether motivated by non-empathy or non-exceptionalism. The outcome remains: humanity finds itself on shifting ground and survival is not to be guaranteed. Misunderstanding, misappropriating and misallocating their agencies, as the text suggests, humans have, they have also accomplished cumulatively little by way of preserving their own future.

Delivering a considerable capture of differing attitudes, concerns, griefs, awes and anxieties by the time we land on 244, in the build-up to it, as well as closely following, the text bombards us with fast, whirlwind statements that function to concretise and amplify its environmental focus. For example:

  1. 236.

    I’d still be getting up in the dark to basically electrocute poultry, if I hadn’t won thirty-five million […].

[…]

  1. 240.

    I look at a butterfly’s wing and I think – random mutations! – so much beauty!

[…]

  1. 260.

    Exxon Valdez? Deepwater Horizon? I’ve read the reports and these are not quote unquote ‘accidents’, these are the entirely foreseeable consequence of unregulated global capitalism. (Crimp 2022, 46, 47, 51)

Like the poignant moment of the child marvelling at the ‘green’ (statement 211), at the Royal Court it was the figure of a baby given the lines of 260. Who better suited, after all, to both condemn and reveal the excesses of a rampant capitalism that has very nearly destroyed the future—the only time relevant to an infant.

As the play begins to near its finale, its intensity grows visceral; at the same time, a cataclysmic dramaturgical effect is achieved by means of variations of the play’s title beginning to populate the stage. These provide indications of the nuances that Not One of These People has the potential to assume and produce, both in the world of the play, and as a reference to the world beyond the theatre, and its practices of self-aggrandising but also self-victimising, of accusation as well as exceptionalism, and, of course, of absolution:

  1. 280.

    I’m not one of these people who looks up into the night sky and deduces from the clarity and exact mechanism of the stars or indeed from the overwhelming scent of jasmine the existence of an all-powerful creator.

[…]

  1. 286.

    If I hadn’t had kids I might’ve been one of those people whose academic theorising about the right to have children in a world whose growing population is ‘morally unsustainable’ is queasily close to the world-view of the nineteenth century geneticists I assume they despise.

[…]

  1. 292.

    I’m not one of these people who’d experiment on non-human animals – exposing their brains and so on – just to reduce the so-called risk to humans. (Crimp 2022, 55, 56)

The final statements, moving the performance to its closing, may not be as intense in content as some preceding ones, quoted above, but they still carry their own power and impact. In their lack of intensity, they no longer inhabit what may be perceived as extremes, but, rather, what we might call common ground: they are much more ordinary; they lie much closer, if not directly at, what we might refer to as the average opinion. In a constellation of plays that are atypical and unpredictable, if we may—cautiously—speak of a characteristic in Crimp’s plays, it is that sometimes they accelerate earlier to begin quietening down shortly before the ending. And, so, no more loud statements are made here; no sharp references, no sudden revelations. It is the ideal way to steer a text so multifaceted towards its finale—but not conclusion as such—by slowing it down, and bringing one of the most, once more, everyday, non-spectacular confessions to the audience before curtain, also delivering one of the play’s most empathetic moments.

Meanwhile, the set has begun to change: from the large screen stage left and the podium stage right, where Crimp has been performing the words ‘spoken’ by the deepfake technology generated faces projected on the screen while swiping across faces on a tablet to accompany the changes in the projection, we are moving somewhere more intimate. Now, an office—better yet, a study—is beginning to be revealed on stage. Upstage left, a coat hanger, with a raincoat hanging; an umbrella; next to it, an armchair; resting in front of it, the author’s shoes, waiting to be filled. The author has never been disembodied in this play—he has been present all long, even as his words have been mouthed by non-existent, yet very much present, others. But, now, the author, as himself, or perhaps as both himself and a dramatised version of himself, but always performed by himself, must enter and walk in his own shoes; he must take presence, flesh and accountability.

Approximately at statement 225, Crimp leaves the stage; his voice is still heard, and the personas continue to ‘speak’ in his absence (none of this is noted in any stage directions). As the study becomes more visible on stage, no longer obscured by the screen—itself now fading in intensity—Crimp re-enters. He is no longer working with a tablet or speaking the words live; statement 264 is unfolding (still via an AI-generated face on the screen) in pre-recorded delivery by Crimp, with a reference to the painter Francis Bacon. We hear that, as Bacon tells his interviewer, David Sylvester, “he wants to disrupt – his word, not mine – disrupt this thing – painting – that he can in fact do with ease” (2022, 52). Crimp’s engagement with Bacon, and the challenge of representing the world, is documented (Angelaki 2012); here, he returns to it, followed by further reference to Immanuel Kant, still in 264. Representation is the issue: of an evaporating world, in art and space—the theatre is both and—that are now, also, under severe threat (once more, the pandemic). And as to disruption, and ease, once more Crimp proves himself to be the master, a term that applies to both painting and theatre. The canvas is redrawn dramatically as we near the finale, from the technologically mediated to the bare, physical and immediate: the quiet descent of the moment of creation as other auteurs are invoked to fill that space of artistic mystagogy; to attempt to describe it. A space that opens, now, between different forms; issues; artworks; stories; times. This is the creative interspace, and the one that produces the ultimate encounter between the author and ourselves. Now, as audience, we appear to be inhabiting a different time and space from previously; a continuum is opening to engage us in the very moment of playwriterly conceptualisation—or, at least, in its dramatisation.

In this new space that the playwright carves out through his presence, the literal re-entrance into the script, and in the theatre—beyond the digital that served as the trademark for COVID-19 performances—our pace of engagement is changed. As the author occupies the room and the structure of the play, Crimp plays a version of himself—while also being himself—that comes into his study, removes his raincoat and shoes, sits in the chair and puts on the pair of shoes that—like the other objects and accessories—had been implying a presence and a body in the absence of both. The author walks to his desk, chooses a record, places it on the record player and presses the needle gently; it is the second movement (Andante con moto) of Franz Schubert’s op. 100, written in the final part of his life (1827/1828 (1999)). The author comes back, then, in more than one way—to reclaim the artwork, as they both endure through time. The dialogue continues: not only voices now, but also sounds: in an ongoing conversation with another artist auteur, Crimp—literally—picks up with Schubert, another recurring reference (Angelaki 2012). As the music swells, so the atmosphere (both mood and environment) continues to transition, so the space continues to be redistributed and reformed. The writer performs the ritual—feels the soil in the flowerpot; waters a plant, looks at the laptop; and sharpens a pencil. Now, it is the playwright that embodies the text and the act of authorship as his voice remains audible in pre-recorded delivery and the statements continue, the staged study—which he inhabits in real time—becoming the interspace in all ways: private and public, both itself and a replica of itself.

The music progressively rises in volume; the voice(s) congest the sound- and space-scape. The writer writes. The screen is lifted upwards and disappears. Now the writer takes up space, but differently from before: centre stage, he reads from a page, and there is no voice amplification; it is only the paper, the body, the voice and the spotlight: these constitute the site of the text, the act, the medium between art and audience. Number 299 is delivered thus; and it is a longer monologue, a sudden, parting luxury of a narrative device that augments time and space: the barest and most physical moment of the play. Its content can be read as both profoundly individual and universal: a person (a woman, perhaps) recounting an early morning call from their twin sister, who narrates an incident pertaining to their mother at a care home; fluctuations of worry and relief; thoughts that give life to other thoughts, on families, and motherhoods, and communications, and legacies, and history, and futures, and agency. And, as part of it, that very call that prompts the speaker to suddenly reflect on their parent

and me and my own children as part of a long animal chain of birth and death […] no free-will, or let’s say, yes, we had free-will, but the world’s will was greater than ours, […] a force that had no regard for individual destinies, or the achievements, so-called, of human culture, seeing no more value in the nine symphonies of Beethoven or eradication of malaria than in the successful assembly of a flat-pack coffee-table […] (Crimp 2022, 58)

As the text ends, so we are reminded of the thread that interconnects: locationality, belonging, agencies, flows and uncertainties. The cosmos and the grain, part of one and the same narrative, or, perhaps, not. The finale takes on the importance of presence, of textures and lyricism in the everyday minutiae and of being part of a greater narrative, and, in doing so, evidences the deep humanity in Crimp’s writing and—as I have discussed elsewhere—his sharpness of observation and the ability to be precise without judging; and to reveal, but not to condemn (Angelaki 2022).

Even though the text is profoundly ethically engaged, one of the strongest gravitational forces towards Crimp’s work is that it is simply not moralist, an attribute that, for the past several decades, it has resisted with notable integrity. And even as this last segment of text recounts a rainy day—the kind that the author, as we have seen in this especially insightful premiere production, has himself just encountered—the play, the performance and the overall experience are not reducible to facile explanations regarding source of inspiration. Rather, they acquire a life of their own, in a space that is as tenuous as it is tangible; as threatened as it is resilient. This is the creative space unique to each playwright, and the common space as well: the theatre auditorium. We discount author and text and physicality at our peril; but to look to the creator to explain the artwork, as the final soundscape of the play, Nick Cave’s “We Call upon the Author” reminds us, while Crimp takes his bow, is also a fallacy. Theatre, after it has been most tested, returns to, and revels in the communal: the shared space. There, author, play and audience are part of a performance continuum, not easily reducible to constituent parts.

Conclusion

This chapter has, by exception, concentrated on two, rather than three plays: Lucy Kirkwood’s Rapture (alternatively Dave Davidson’s That Is Not Who I Am) and Martin Crimp’s Not One of These People. The reason behind this choice is the expansive, at times even apparently uncontainable nature of each of these texts. It could not have been otherwise for work by two of the most diverse and original voices of contemporary British playwriting that, in taking on that most elusive and illusive interspace, the internet, present us with extensive, multifaceted engagements with the domain perhaps initially conceptualised as a site for working parenthetically, facilitating the functions and requirements of the physical world, but that has, rather, produced unprecedented liminality. The interspace of the digital realm, then, as this chapter has shown, emerges as the ultimate fluid environment, which both produces and installs in-betweenness as a permanent state.

Through their respective dramaturgies and preoccupations, which show the digital as embedded in the intertwined acts of (self-)authoring and living, and through both the displacing and re-positioning of the author at the very heart of such e-lusive e-cologies of text, and of narration, both texts probe how agency, creative, environmental and civic might be staged in a way that startles and surprises towards motivating engagement. Each in its own way, both plays have taken on the emerging landscapes—social, digital, political, individual, collective—following the COVID-19 pandemic. The plays have, as this chapter has shown, also queried and contextualised the emerging ecologies of separation from one’s social and spatial context, and the isolation resulting from distancing as a dominant state, absorbed into the fibre of humanity, rather than a passing condition somehow containable. Still, as this chapter has likewise demonstrated, these plays have also asked how theatre might begin to re-enter the narrative of an altered theatre ecology, and how it might populate another ultimate interspace between art and society: the theatre auditorium, both digital and visceral, with bodies, images, ideas, and words that might claim substance and presence; and that might compel processes of querying how the next day in theatre and sustainability—physical, financial, environmental—might look. Ultimately, both plays take on these intersecting tasks by placing their own viability, stageability and overall tenability at the very centre of the experiment; this renders them bold and brave acts of theatre. That the texts have undertaken such complex tasks while also asking how the singular author, dispersed through the faces and the bodies of many, both palimpsest and hologram, presence and absence, might endure, also as a resilient site, is to their credit. Human—and authorial—agency, at its barest, most immediate form, still has a rather major role to play, both texts reveal—literally, metaphorically and emphatically.